Interview with the Vampire—Ann Rice
A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess
A Brief History of Time—Stephen Hawking
The Golden Compass—Phillip Pullman
Pride and Prejudice—Jane Austen
Fight Club—Chuck Palahniuk
Molecular Mechanisms of Learning—Frank Lee
The Selfish Gene—Richard Dawkins
The Mist—Stephen King
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy—Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—Douglas Adams Death in Venice—Thomas Mann
A Scanner Darkly—Philip K. Dick
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—Hunter S Thompson
Kafka on the Shore—Haruki Murakami
Superfreakonomics--Levitt and Dubner
Things Fall Apart—Chinua Achebe
Lies My Teacher Told Me—James Loewen
Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neil Hurston
The Subtle Knife—Phillip Pullman
The Country Doctor—Balzac
The Amber Spyglass—Phillip Pullman
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—Mark Twain
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep—Phil Dick
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Ken Kesey
Greed--Chris Ryan
American Psycho—Bret Easton Ellis
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly—Jean-Dominique Bauby
Creativity—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Narcissus and Goldmund—Herman Hesse
Brave New World—Aldous Huxley
US Constitution—various
The Culture Code—Clotaire Rapailles
The world according to Garp—John Irving
To the Lighthouse—Virginia Woolf
Carrie—Stephen King
1984—George Orwell
Gertrude and Claudius—John Updike
The Old Man and the Sea—Ernest Hemingway
Cannery Row—John Steinbeck
God is Not Great—Chris Hitchens
Tess of the D'Urbervilles—Thomas Hardy
Turnips on the Ceiling—Janis Renner Domer
The Sun Also Rises—Ernest Hemingway
Empire of the Ants—Bernard Werber
The Stranger—Albert Camus
The Handmaid's Tale—Margaret Atwood
Hard Times—Charles Dickens
Boomerang:Travels in the New Third world—Michael Lewis
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—Haruki Murakami
Life, the Universe and Everything—Douglas Adams
So long and Thanks for all the Fish--Douglas Adams
Breakfast of Champions—Kurt Vonnegut
Mostly Harmless—Douglas Adams
The Hunger Games—Suzanne Collins
The Red Pony—John Steinbeck
Something Wicked This Way Comes—Ray Bradbury
Thinner—Steven King
Please Look After Mom—Kyung Sook Shin
I’m a Stanger Here Myself—Bill Bryson
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close—Jonathan Safran Foer
Sense and Sensibility—Jane Austen
Breakfast at Tiffany's—Truman Capote
Dress Your Kids in Corduroy and Denim—David Sedaris
Push—Sapphire
The Hot Kid—Elmore Leonard
23 things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism—Jang Ha Joon
In Cold Blood—Truman Capote
The Art of Travel—Alain de Botton
Fatherhood—Bill Cosby
After Dark—Haruki Murakami
Into the Wild—Jon Krakauer
The Mother Tongue—Bill Bryson
Candide--Voltaire
The Big Sleep--Raymond Chandler
Macbeth—Shakespeare
Cause of Death—Patricia Cornwell
Naked Lunch—William S. Burroughs
Of Mice and Men—John Steinbeck
So I haven’t written a blog in….a really long time. And I realize that it might be a bit tacky to start with a list of things I’ve done—overweening pride and all that. But because I made it such a top priority of my year to read a whole buncha books, more than I had ever read in one year, I think that I deserve this moment in the sun; not to gloat or carry on, but to record for posterity what can be accomplished with just a little tenacity, time-management and resolve. Now if only I could apply these virtues to my writing, studying, working, money-saving…
The book goal this year was 100—a nice fat, solid number. And, I thought, achievable. It works out to about a book every three and a half days (a book every 3.65 days to be exact). Despite my busy lifestyle during weeks and weekends, I figured I could accomplish this by sheer will. And I set a sub-goal this year of not reading anything too fluffy. This could mean anything under 100 pages and/or anything cartoonish. I broke this rule once with the U.S. Constitution, which was surprisingly short, and suspiciously simple to understand. However, every other book I read was either a novel (heavy or light) or a serious work of academic study or popular science, economics, sociology, or history.
Because I don’t want to spend three weeks writing blurbs about the books I read, I’m just gonna make the list and write one sentence (or a few) about each book, plus a couple adjectives describing my overall feelings about it—sorta like a qualitative review (better than stars!). Hope I can be an inspiration to all the kiddies (and grown-ups) out there who say they have no time to read.
Without further ado, here is the list in chronological order of the eighty (…not 100) books that I managed to read between October 1, 2011 and October 1, 2012.
Night Shift—Stephen King; -A collection of King’s short stories from his early years, including one about killer mice in a basement, a club that murders you if you don’t quit smoking, and the classic Children of the Corn. Development in progress, predictable at times, imaginative
Interview with the Vampire—Ann Rice; -Lonely, depressed vampire with morals mopes around European cities at night for centuries trying to find meaning in his existence, dwelling on past loves and tragedies. Depressing and dark and sensual.
A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess; -A strange language of slang carries a not-too-distant-future world into existence, chronicling the very bad deeds of teenagers and showing society’s vain attempts to curb their adolescent lusts. Electric and terrifying and abstractly satirical.
A Brief History of Time—Stephen Hawking; -Everything you wanted to know about black holes and special relativity but didn’t know how or whom to ask. Dense material made comprehensible.
The Golden Compass—Phillip Pullman; -First of three in a fantasy trilogy about a special girl destined to unite the many worlds in the universe who learns about the schism between the knowledge extant in the world and the orthodox institutions which shield people from this knowledge. Impressive in scope and detail; a million miles better than the movie.
Pride and Prejudice—Jane Austen; -Edwardian Period realist romance novel in which a prudent young lady watches her silly sisters find suitable men as she herself takes her time, until one day she meets a man who, because of her prejudice, she thinks to be haughty and terrible, but who is actually filled with the most sublime character and love for her. Romantic and very civil
Fight Club—Chuck Palahniuk; -A surrealistic satire about men finding physical escape in a world that wants them to be less than men—to be boring and tidy and responsible—and ultimately the limits of this escape that are possible before anarchy and other kinds of oppressive structures arise. Brutal, terse, funny, often truthful
Molecular Mechanisms of Learning—Frank Lee; -An academic paper (doctoral thesis maybe) on dendrites, axons and synapses concluding that learning is a special and traceable kind of synaptic sequence…I don’t think I was supposed to read this.
The Selfish Gene—Richard Dawkins; -Landmark popular biology book that argues against group theories of evolution (“survival of the species”) in favor of the gene theory of evolution (“survival of the gene”) and how the individual (human, fly, tree, etc) is basically a gene machine—a housing built for the sole purpose of passing along genes. Compelling, awesome, changed how I view the motives of all behavior of all living organisms
The Mist—Stephen King; -A long, scary short-story about a mysterious fog that rolls over a New England town, killing everything in its path with alien tentacle creatures; most of the story takes place in a grocery store. Weird, early King
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy—Douglas Adams; -First in a series: A sci-fi compendium of the universe with quasi-plots and dozens of quirky, imaginative characters that interact in impossible ways over eons of time and across millions of galaxies. Futurama, Star Wars, later Star Trek franchises, MST3K, Red Dwarf—ALL are deeply indebted to these books.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—Douglas Adams; -Second in the Hitchhiker’s Guide (HHGTTG) series—as weird as the first but we come to know more about Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, as well as more auxiliary characters. Better plot than the first, and more science and sci-fi
Death in Venice—Thomas Mann; --An Austrian man is vacationing in Venice and experiences strange, existentialist bouts of ennui and sexual attraction just as a strange sickness is rolling through and killing hundreds people. Kind of like Camus’s The Plague or Sartre’s Nausea but with less philosophical overtones and more artful prose
A Scanner Darkly—Philip K. Dick; -A sort-of science fiction novel about a narcotics cop in the future who, like all narcs, must hide himself in a scrambling suit to avoid being identified and who, like many other narcs, becomes addicted to the substance he is charged with eradicating, leading to deep paranoia and questions about who he can trust, what ethical path he is taking, and who he really is. Suspenseful, humane, wonderfully unique in idea and development
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—Hunter S Thompson; -Journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney drive through the Nevada desert towards Las Vegas to cover a dune-buggy race and also to get incredibly fucked-up and lose sense of reality while causing all kinds of mayhem which they should feel ashamed about but about which they are unaware or so intoxicated that questions of guilt, blame, morality, and rectitude don’t even enter into the equation. What happened? Where am I? Who has my ether bottle?
Kafka on the Shore—Murakami Haruki; -Young Kafuka leaves his loathsome father’s house in Tokyo and heads south for some purpose unknown to him, having strange dreams and hearing news that his father was meanwhile murdered; later he finds his long-lost mother and sleeps with her, a cat-heart-eating villain is killed by a simpleton vagrant, and Kafuka wanders off into the mountain mists of another time. What the fuck, Murakami? Dreamlike, surreal, delicious, mind-altering
Superfreakonomics--Levitt and Dubner; -Like Freakonomics, pop economics book full of amazing counterintuitive or unrelated economic and sociological relationships, such as the advent of cars saving lives and the environment by ending the use of horses in towns, and many, many more. Surprising, fun, some claims seem superficial or dubiously researched
Things Fall Apart—Chinua Achebe; -Realist fiction novel about coming of age in a tiny central African village—traditions, beliefs, superstitions, daily life and death—in the years and months before it is “discovered” by missionaries and other white Europeans. Plaintive, beautifully written, and devastating in its simple truths of history
Lies My Teacher Told Me—James Loewen; -Anti-revisionist revisionist American History book that takes a closer look at events from American History as portrayed in high school textbooks—from Columbus to Thanksgiving to the Constitution to the Civil War, all through the Civil Rights movement—and concludes that history is being whitewashed for students, that kids are being sold a sterile, cartoonish, untrue, ultra-patriotic pack of lies that they leave school believing is “the story of America”, when in fact it could be taught truthfully and therefore be much more interesting to our students. Compelling, important, anti-mythology/pro-truth kind of book
Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neil Hurston; -Novel set in 1920’s Florida about a strong, resolute, optimistic woman finding her way through life’s struggles and triumphs; a larger metaphor for the struggles of black people in America and a microcosm of rural black life. Excellent story and characters, beautiful writing, one of the best early 20th century novels
The Subtle Knife—Phillip Pullman; -Book two of His Dark Materials trilogy (after Golden Compass): Takes place both in our world and in the parallel fantasy world when a boy discovers a portal between the two worlds and ventures back and forth hoping to discover answers to the nature of existence and the fabric of the world—also, more about this mysterious substance known as “dust”. Complex, swerving, highly imaginative, better than the first book
The Country Doctor—Balzac; -A French Post-Napoleonic short novel dealing with the cross-country roving of a general, who stumbles upon a small town where a benevolent doctor lives and is respected by all the members of the town for his ceaseless dedication to their lives and sufferings. Servility before nobility—the prose is really nice but the story is a bit bucolic, even by centuries-old standards for novels.
The Amber Spyglass—Phillip Pullman; --The third novel in His Dark Materials trilogy: The fantasy series culminates when the worlds of the two children are breached by dark forces and must therefore be sewn up eternally so that no more “dust” can escape and let evil into the universe. A kind of entropy if applied to morality and metaphysical beings. More epic, fantastical, and philosophical than the first two.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—Mark Twain; -Huckleberry Finn’s more sophisticated younger friend, whose hijinks are no less ornery or spectacular than Huck's, including witnessing a murder, getting trapped in a cave for days and being presumed dead, and finding a massive treasure. Mark Twain—master writer of detail, of childhood, and of satire dealing with peoples and societies at large.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—Philip K. Dick; -The book on which the film “Blade Runner” was based, it is a futuristic thriller about androids who don’t know they are androids and the society that is hell bent on destroying them because of their “otherness”. Anticipates robot literature, movies and media to come and offers moral questions regarding the bounds of consciousness, agency and civil rights.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Ken Kesey; -When Randle Patrick McMurphy enters the mental health ward of the hospital in lieu of serving a prison sentence (which he managed by malingering insanity) he shakes everything up, from the other patients (inmates) to Big Nurse Ratched to the head of the hospital; he is a force for inspiration in the face of a futile, vegetative existence in the hospital and unfortunately his wild nature proves to be his tragic undoing. The prose and strength of characters in this narrative blew me away; it’s certainly one of the best-written novels from the last 75 years.
Greed--Chris Ryan; -Action and adventure from some of England and Ireland’s finest as they try and hijack a terrorist ship while stealing all of its loot for a payoff. Little do they know the terrorists have allies and plans for vengeance. Macho, action-packed, typical for this sort of book.
American Psycho—Bret Easton Ellis; -The day-to-day diary of one Patrick Bateman—Wall Street wolf by day, hunter, killer, and expert narcissist by night. A relentless internal monologue of detail—either about brands and fashion or murder, rape and mutilation—carries this exquisitely disturbing novel about a high-society psychopath living in the fast times of the 1980’s. Exhilarating, exhausting, mind-numbingly violent, crazy.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly—Jean-Dominique Bauby; -Autobiographical account of a successful middle-aged magazine editor trapped in his own body after a stroke, with only the ability to wriggle a pinky finger and move his eyes. The meaning of life is reinvented, reevaluated entirely in this man’s voice, a vibrant mind locked inside a useless human shell. Touching, empathetic.
Creativity—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; -A professor of sociology chooses a handful of the most creative people from all domains, based on several strict criteria (such as the impact on domain, the depth of work, and the consistency of their productivity) and analyzes them, addressing in the process many intriguing questions: What makes creative people special? Why aren’t more of us creative? Is it possible to become a creative person? Why does creating make us so happy? Huge in scope, heavy on anecdotal evidence, inspiring for those of us who want to be more creative.
Narcissus and Goldmund—Herman Hesse; -Set in medieval Europe, A yin-yang dynamic between two cloistered monks causes their paths to diverge drastically, one remaining in the fold and steeped in scholasticism, the other discovering himself and life through countless adventures and interactions with the sinful outside world. When they reconvene they are that much more bonded for their different ways of being in the world. Warm and flowing, moral without moralizing, Hesse always reads like a classical fable.
Brave New World—Aldous Huxley; -In a dystopian future world where history is bunk, sex and drugs are for children, and intellectualism is the dirtiest of ideas, a Shakespeare-quoting Savage is introduced from the outer-world to illumine the horrific juxtaposition of art and a society built on pleasure and convenience. Prescient, genius depictions of a future that is very much now; among the greatest literature with social commentary.
US Constitution—various; -Including the Bill of Rights and ratified amendments until 2000. Concise and well-conceived, though it’s obvious why constitutional challenges occur so frequently—it is a LIVING document after, all.
The Culture Code—Clotaire Rapailles; -According to this French sociologist, there is a key to every culture lurking behind the conceptions cultures have of themselves which is often counterintuitive, but which, if turned the right way, can unlock all kinds of id-type truths about what makes people in that culture tick—and also how to target advertizing to those various peoples. Interesting in a Freakonomics sort of way; a bit reductionist and generalizing but still quite fun to wonder at.
The World According to Garp—John Irving; -Bildungsroman of the famed, if not prolific, fictional novelist T.S. Garp and his wacky Forrest Gump-esque interactions with the world. A beautiful, stretching, tragic, inconceivably executed kind of biography of a fictional person done in a humanistic and humoristic fashion that ONLY John Irving could pull off. I really love this book.
To the Lighthouse—Virginia Woolf; -A detailed telling of the week on holiday when the kids wanted to go up to the lighthouse but something kept delaying them—feuds, weather, ambivalent feelings about the past and current moods regarding the future. This is Modernism in vanguard form and feels a bit to me like a Matisse painting: it sounds interesting in theory and lacks substance up close. Focused, slow, repetitive, theme-driven, unbearably boring.
Carrie—Stephen King; -The horrific story of a girl coming of age, only to find that she’s a freak of nature with telekinetic superpowers and a murderous vendetta against practically everyone in her small town who has scorned and mocked her for years and years, including her mother, teachers and classmates. Reads like a Playboy short-story; dark and frank, but the writing not as strong as King’s later stuff.
1984—George Orwell; -The classic dystopian novel whose title is shorthand for “totalitarian state”, it is as bleak a look into the future of human society as can be, with everything painted in grey—citizens, streets, buildings, gin—but the Party Propaganda, imagined in vivid and unfading red and white and black; it is a society in which there is no hope for thriving, if thriving means thinking, wondering, knowing about the world and having the ability to change the future. Immortal work about language, power, and ideology and their tendency to dominate the human will to freedom.
Gertrude and Claudius—John Updike; -A novel about Hamlet’s parents, taken from the Shakespearean characters and extended into a delightful drama about two lovers—a queen and her champion—who ultimately conspire to murder the king and rule Denmark together, with disastrous consequences, of course. Rich period language, emphasis on character motivations, refreshing concept for a novel, really very well constructed.
The Old Man and the Sea—Ernest Hemingway; -The parable of an old man catching a fish alone for hours that is as succinct and fable-like as it has always been depicted. What Hemingway does remarkably well is to delve into the soul of the character so that we are really there with him, inside of him, living this experience and feeling his elation, exhaustion, and finally his dismay over nature’s cruelty. Clear, strong, vivid, true.
Cannery Row—John Steinbeck; -Amazing short novel about the goings on in Monterrey, California in the first few decades of the 20th century; includes the travails of a gang of drunken roustabouts, the attempts of the town intellectual to deal with these men who also happen to be his “friends”, and the lives of various other town residents which compose this fictional place. Characters are so well portrayed that one suspects Steinbeck knew them personally—this book feels like the work of a 20th century Mark Twain. Sublime vignettes, slightly tragic, subtly critical of American capitalist values, fun as hell to read.
God is Not Great—Christopher Hitchens; -A tireless tract about why we shouldn’t believe in god (or gods), argued from every angle: moral, logical, scientific, pragmatic. Hitchens is the master of acerbic language and saves his best material for the big guy in the sky, who, after this depiction and that of his followers in this book, should by all rights be on trial for crimes against humanity right now. Pugilistic, hilarious, righteous, awesome (talking about the book here, not God).
Tess of the D'Urbervilles—Thomas Hardy; -The saga of a poor and beautiful farm girl who discovers she is of noble blood, which begins her downfall from innocence into obscure wandering, laboring, and further poverty, where she finds that one sin of indiscretion begets a lifetime of suffering and tragedy in Victorian Industrial England’s priggish, unforgiving society. Bleak, tragic, realistic motivations for action
Turnips on the Ceiling—Janis Renner Domer; -A memoir of a Southern schoolgirl dealing with a troubled household, an alcoholic father, and an interesting yet rocky adolescence as she discovers her own voice on her way to becoming the first female college scholarship winner in her county; told in short anecdotes. Revealing yet reserved, beautiful vignettes, candid about details but not such a view into the mind of the author
The Sun Also Rises—Ernest Hemingway; -A semi-autobiographical story of an impotent American WWI veteran lazing around in Paris with intellectual friends, when the call of adventures in Spain moves him to partake in the five-day San Fermin bullfighting festival in Pamplona—everyone gets drunk, goes fishing, makes and breaks friendships, and learns that the immediate effects of superficially imbibing another culture are a hangover and a lovely kind of cross-cultural misunderstanding. Quick, strong writing (Hemingway, after all) in this exhilarating story of a broken spirit on a spiritual journey with other broken spirits.
Empire of the Ants—Bernard Werber; -“What Richard Adams did for rabbits in Watership Down, Werber does for ants.” This quote sums up the anthropomorphological account of two rogue ants as they attempt to discover what has been destroying their colony; it leads them to quite astounding discoveries. An awesome mystery/fantasy/adventure/science novel about ants written by an entomologist!
The Stranger—Albert Camus; -A existentialist or absurdist primer in the form of a novel, it is the story of an Algerian man named Mersault who wanders through life not really paying much attention to the moral significance of his actions but who finally pays the ultimate price when he kills an Arab man on the beach and is condemned to death mostly by the preponderance of evidence at his trial against the goodness of his character. Stark, dry as the Algerian landscape, full of meaning about the morality of our actions and what it means to be “good” or “bad”.
The Handmaid's Tale—Margaret Atwood; -Dystopian novel set in a world where women have been reduced to vessels for bearing children or living in aristocratic luxury, similar to castes in India. Many religious and feminist overtones, haunting, 1984-esque.
Hard Times—Charles Dickens; -Dickens’ novel about social hypocrisy of the upper classes in their view towards the working classes; it is a tragedy told in classic Dickensian form and with similar coincidences, but it is much shorter than most of his other works. Captivating characters, humorous, bleak and satirical.
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World—Michael Lewis; -An economic writer travels to Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Germany after the 2008 global financial meltdown to discover what these economies created a situation that allowed them to fall so far and how they are acting to remediate their bleak circumstances. Often generalizing culture and characterizing peoples, feels like “European Stereotypes for Americans 101: Economics Edition”, humorous yet moderately informative.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—Haruki Murakami; -A wind-up bird noise, the mystery of a missing cat, deep and empty wells, obscure female odd-job detectives, somnambulant episodes of murder, a baseball bat, torture and human-skinning, rape and desire, precocious nymphet neighbors. Murakami is weird and so so awesome, maybe my favorite writer still writing today.
Life, the Universe and Everything—Douglas Adams; -More space wackiness from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the continuing saga of Zaphod Beeblebrox, a major character from the first two books. Here we meet some more characters, attend some ridiculously impossible space parties, and hope that the Vogons still aren’t on our tail. More convoluted and less interesting than the first two.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish--Douglas Adams; -The fourth installment of HHGTHG, the only one with a really coherent plot, were Arthur Dent falls in love with an Earth girl named Fenchurch and we learn that the previously-destroyed Earth has now been restored by the superior dolphin species as part of their “Save the Humans” campaign. Truly different and yet vastly touching, Arthur is finally rounded out as a character.
Breakfast of Champions—Kurt Vonnegut; -The story of "two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast”, chronicles the unlikely crossing of paths of Dwayne Hoover, a used car deal, and Kilgore Trout, an obscure science fiction writer. The crossing ends in a psychotic break, in a murder, but mostly in a twisted social satire of basically everything spewing from society’s faucet-head. Weird, cartoon illustrations, astute satire, barebones truth of human nature
Mostly Harmless—Douglas Adams; -The fifth and final installment in the HHGTTG series, in which we are finally led to the question of the answer to the meaning of life (which is “42”), the Vogon’s take over the HHGTTG headquarters in order to destroy Earth, and Arthur is united with his teenage daughter of whose existence he was unaware. The best book in the series in terms of plot, dialogue and themes.
The Hunger Games—Suzanne Collins; -A post-civil war world (country?) is divided into districts from one to twelve, each poorer then the last, from which each year two contestants under the age of eighteen must battle to the death in a giant artificial landscape rigged with boobytraps all for the sake of entertainment and allegiance to the capital they are beholden to. Social commentary, Pyongyang meets Survivor meets The Beach; teen lit.
The Red Pony—John Steinbeck; -Young ranch-boy Jody Tiflin has one big dream, to have a pony of his own and raise it; but he is forced to bow to the cruel forces of nature when his pony falls sick and must be put down. Lots of other touching stories of the hardened residents of the California mountains. Picturesque, plaintive, Steinbeck is a master of close prose.
Something Wicked This Way Comes—Ray Bradbury; -A macabre carnival comes to a small Midwestern town and something about it is amiss—all of the carnies are centenarians and seem to have some slightly evil designs for the townsfolk. Reads like Poe in the 1950’s, dark and slightly hokey for a horror story.
Thinner—Steven King; -A man’s involvement in a vehicular homicide leads him to be the victim of a gypsy curse, one that fates him to waste away to nothing no matter what he eats; it is the man’s coming to terms with his actions and attempts to track down the man, apologize, and undo the cure. Interestingly thrilling, fast-paced, tight sort of naturalistic horror novel.
Please Look After Mom—Kyung Sook Shin; -An elderly senile Korean woman from the countryside gets separated from her husband in a busy Seoul subway station and a family tries in vain to find her; a heart-wrenchingly emotional story about what mothers do and how we often overlook their alternate roles as human beings. Really, really, really, really sad and beautifully crafted.
I’m a Stanger Here Myself—Bill Bryson; -Bill Bryson moves back to the United States after twenty years in England; here he remarks on all of the peculiarities of living in the U.S. (and in a small New England town in particular) as if he were some sort of Rip Van Winkle of the 20th century. Hilariously perceptive and witty and more than a little critical.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close—Jonathan Safran Foer; -A few years after the horrors of 9/11, a boy who lost his father in the attacks finds a key that, he thinks, may be a clue to understanding something important about his father. In search of the answer to his riddle he discovers more about coping with loss, about humanity, and about the kinds of people that exist in the world and in a strange, wondrous place like NYC. Reflective, philosophical, often bewilderingly with its POV from a precocious, logical, imaginative, distracted little boy
Sense and Sensibility—Jane Austen; -Austen’s first novel, it is the story of sisters with different personalities searching for different kinds of men and the men who would obscure their actions and intentions with brusque replies and beguiling formalities. Good introduction to Austen, but with its meandering and tedious plot lines, it is not nearly as good as Pride and Prejudice.
Breakfast at Tiffany's—Truman Capote; -Holly Golightly is a young Manhattan socialite, but she can also be as vexing as she is dazzling, and her escapades with men, with neighbors, with cats, with ex-husband, and with the law—all told through the eyes of one of her brief-but-affected confidantes, a man she calls “Fred”—come together to form one of the most interesting characters in any short story, and one of the most incredibly crafted short stories of the last hundred years. Capote is breathtakingly skilled at capturing personality and creating life-like dialogue between these personalities—so life-like it looms larger than life. SOOOO much better than the fluffy Audrey Hepburn movie.
Dress Your Kids in Corduroy and Denim—David Sedaris; -Another David Sedaris treasure, this one focuses on his family (as do so many of his books) including stories about each of his many siblings and his parents, and gives a better view on the twisted childhood that formed the character of this wry, legendary comedic essayist. Poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, satirical, twisted
Push—Sapphire; -A haunting diary--two years in the life of one Precious Jones, black teenager, mother, rape and incest survivor, dyslexic student, and finally HIV carrier. It is told in her voice, urban and uneducated, raw and unedited, and one gets a sense of the festering, horrible realities that befall people who have fallen through the cracks in our Western societies. Though the character is a walking billboard for every kind of advocacy program imaginable, her voice is so strong and pure that you cannot help but believe in her and root for her to get through this hell and find a better place. Harsh, impassioned, depressing and yet uplifting
The Hot Kid—Elmore Leonard; -A true-crime/Western/action novel set in the early 20th century, there are bank-robbers, robber-barrens, barren Oklahoma oil fields, and fields of opportunity for one hot young US Marshall on the trail of several wanted criminals and only he, the Hot Kid, can stop them. Fun, fast, typical kind of Western but without excessive gun-slinging and killing.
23 things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism—Jang Ha Joon; -A bullet-pointed follow-up to “Bad Samaritans”, Ha spends twenty-three chapters demolishing the free-market theories of Milton Friedman and co. It’s not anti-capitalist, but it is pro-regulation, pro-protectionism, and pro-historical accuracy when addressing the successes and failures of the marketplace and the demonized (in American politics) yet positively essential facets of a planned economy. Ha argues that all successful economies are socialized and that free markets are a fiction and a bad fiction at that. Easy to understand, fun, pugilistic but truthful
In Cold Blood—Truman Capote; -The legendary true-crime account of the Holcomb, Kansas family who was killed in their own home in the autumn of 1959, Capote lived amongst the townspeople for four years documenting every conceivable detail of the crime and even constructing biographies of every person directly or indirectly involved in the case. What he creates is as real as it gets (though some of it has allegedly been fictionalized)—a psychological peek into wanton murderers’ lives; into the destructive force of violent death on small-town America; into the symbolic loss of innocence that separated the complacent 50’s from the turbulent 60’s. An awesome, gripping account
The Art of Travel—Alain de Botton; -A handbook on how to enhance the experience of travel by looking at it in different ways—what is the purpose of travel? What do we want from it? What destinations should we choose? Does travel really make us understand anything more? A richly intellectual book with lots of references to fin de siècle essayists and Romantic period adventurers; perfect for the literary person and the person who wants to know why they should love to travel so much as they do.
Fatherhood—Bill Cosby; -A jaunty romp into the joys and miseries of parenthood—as seen through the eyes of daddy—told by one of America’s foremost trusted moral comedic voices. Using a somewhat hokey style that is very 1980’s, it lacks serious substance but will make a man think twice (or three or ten times) before purposefully procreating. Brisk, lighthearted, anecdotal
After Dark—Haruki Murakami; -Set in the heart of Tokyo and starting in a Denny’s restaurant, the action takes place over the course of one night. Mari, a 19-year old student, meets all kinds of people—a beaten prostitute, a trombone player, and a sadistic computer expert who is being hunted by the beaten lady’s pimp. It is still dreamlike Murakami, but with a real-time timeline and more concrete action. Abstract and yet vivid, feels a bit incomplete, like a strange early morning after doing cocaine all night
Into the Wild—Jon Krakauer; -The long-form biography of one Christopher McCandless, an elite athlete and promising student who, on the incredible strength of his convictions, releases himself from mainstream society by taking an unregistered car around America and finally going on a solo journey into the heart of the Alaskan wilderness, where he finally succumbs to the nature he celebrated with such ecstasy in life. An amazing picture of a misunderstood person, Krakauer draws so much more out of this story than just a lesson, a narrative, or a biography. He moves back the lens and looks at society, at the human tendency to conquer and explore, and at our ambivalence to either go to back to a natural state or barricade ourselves away from nature entirely. Intense, detailed, elucidating, incredibly written
The Mother Tongue—Bill Bryson; -“English and How it Got that Way” says the subheading for this book, which is at once a cherry-picked etymology of English and a celebration of the mish-mash of languages that we give a single name to. He covers linguistic history, dialects, “proper” English, swearing, language games, proper names, and other areas while making it all seem so graspable in its infinite detail. Many have disputed some of Bryson’s generalizations, but it seems that the gist is intact: English is a cool and weird world language. Interesting (perhaps) for intellectuals and laymen alike
Candide—Voltaire; -A satire wrapped in a crazy and tragic worldwide adventure, Voltaire tells the story of an optimist moving through a world of horror like he is a character from a Norse saga, and his sharp observations about life as it was in the 18th century are still as useful today perhaps as they were back then. Humanity is consistently brutal and charming. Timeless and intelligent
The Big Sleep--Raymond Chandler; -A great hard-boiled mystery by one of the very first noire mystery writers, it oozes coolness from its Los Angeles pores like a gin and soda left on the backroom credenza at an illegal poker club. So many great one-liners and similes here, it is a book that spawned a thousand Hollywood private dicks. Cool, emotionless, intriguing plot
Macbeth—Shakespeare; -Shakespeare’s shortest play is perhaps also his easiest to understand in terms of character motivations and human folly. Something wicked this way comes… Medieval, psychological, bloody, to the point (for a Shakespeare play)
Cause of Death—Patricia Cornwell; -A crime/mystery novel set in the Chesapeake Bay area of the U.S., this is the case of the poisoned diver, the seemingly accidental death that hides a gigantic and quickly unfolding conspiracy which, with the tenacious work of forensic detective Kay Scarpetta, links a local religious cult with a nuclear terrorist threat, and blah blah blah. This starts out interesting and just goes off the rails into silly absurdity. What the hell is local a forensic scientist doing working for the Pentagon and flying to Europe to fight terrorists?!
Naked Lunch—William S. Burroughs; -In this nightmarish account of an international heroin addict, reality and fantasy are constantly blurred. Imagine if James Joyce were on acid instead of alcohol, and also if he were a voracious nymphomaniac with lurid visions of bondage and sexual mutilation—you would then have Naked Lunch. It is a testament to the power of incredible prose to seep through the roughest of subjects and narratives and even to shed light on these subjects in previously unimagined ways—illumination of reality is the idea behind the title itself. The structure of the plot and literary forms—non-linear, abstract, surreal, absurd—helped to create a whole new school of thought on what a novel should be. Twisted, gorgeous depictions, sadistic scenes, raw
Of Mice and Men—John Steinbeck ; -George and Lenny, clever and thick, complex and simple, guilty and innocent. There are many layers of archetypes that could be applied to the itinerant ranch hands who are the central characters in this short book, but basically Lenny’s actions and his death seem to tell a story of the cruelty, the unfairness of life. This book is a microcosm of all of Steinbeck’s works and demonstrate his ability to capture life as both real and affected, and he often digs up the moral truths that lie behind the apparently amoral happenings in his novels. It’s not a moralizing lesson, not a fable, but perhaps an enigmatic parable disguised as simply another harsh slice of life.
Thanks for checking out my book list. My goal for next year still stands at one hundred books, but I will go easier on myself and also try to read much longer books I’ve been longing to get to, counting one with over 600 pages as two. Again, it is arbitrary, but having some sort of reading goal has really helped me, a quite lazy and unorganized person, stick with a schedule and get a LOT of good reading done. Best of luck to you all on your own reading goals!
