2015 reading: here are some numbers.

this is why i like the end of the year.  >:3

in 2015, i read 68 books*, and here are my top 7 from those 68 (in no particular order) (or, rather, in the order i posted them on instagram, which was in no particular order).

1. helen macdonald, h is for hawk (jonathan cape, 2014)
2. alex mar, witches of america (FSG, 2015)
3. patricia park, re jane (viking, 2015)
4. rebecca solnit, the faraway nearby (penguin, 2014, paperback)
5. jonathan franzen, purity (FSG, 2015)
6. han kang, human acts (portobello, 2016)
7. robert s. boynton, the invitation-only zone (FSG, forthcoming 2016)

(you can find quotes and reasons why i chose these 7 on my instagram.)

* as of this posting time.  i still have two days to read more!

---

in 2015, i went to 38 book events and readings, and here are 10 i particularly enjoyed.

1. marie mutsuki mockett and emily st. john mandel with ken chen at AAWW
2. michael cunningham at columbia
3. meghan daum with glenn kurtz at mcnally jackson
4. kazuo ishiguro and caryl phillips at the 92Y
5. aleksandar hemon with sean macdonald at mcnally jackson
6. alexandra kleeman and patricia park with anelise chen at AAWW
7. lauren groff at bookcourt
8. jonathan franzen with wyatt mason at st. joseph's college
9. patti smith with david remnick at the new yorker festival
10. alex mar with leslie jamison at housingworks bookstore

(both franzen events had no-photo policies.)

---

in 2015, i took 34 photos of books with pie.  mind you, this is not the number of times i ate pie.  this is simply the number of times i went to eat pie and decided to photograph it with the book i was reading at the time.  and by pie, i mean pie from four and twenty blackbirds because their pie is delicious and not too sweet and totally worth going to gowanus for (so, if you're in nyc, go get some!).

here are 5 photos of books with pie because it would be unnecessarily mean of me to torture you with all 34 slices of amazing pie, wouldn't it?

---

in 2015, i took 38 photos of books with stitch.

i suppose, to provide some context:  i love stitch.  lilo and stitch is one of my favorite movies (we're talking top 3 here).  i've had this stitch for 13 years.  i still shamelessly take him with me everywhere (he's in california with me right now).  obviously, he popped up every now and then with a book.

here are 5 photos of books with stitch.  i'm totally choosing how many photos to post arbitrarily (in multiples of 5, though, so maybe not so arbitrarily?).

---

in 2015, my book club started, and we read 10 books.  we've now eased into a routine of meeting at my friend's apartment and having a potluck, but we were absent this routine the first two times we met, hence the three out-of-place photos.  i know; it's making me a little twitchy, too; but we'll have 12 consistent flat-lays from 2016!

1. marilynne robinson, lila (FSG, 2014)
2. alice munro, the beggar maid (vintage, 1991) (first published 1977)
3. kazuo ishiguro, an artist of the floating world (vintage,1989) (first published 1986)
4. margaret atwood, the stone mattress (nan a. talese, 2014)
5. jeffrey eugenides, the virgin suicides (picador, 2009) (first published 1993)
6. ta-nehisi coates, between the world and me (random house, 2015)
7. virginia woolf, mrs. dalloway (vintage, 1992) (first published 1925)
8. michael cunningham, the hours (FSG, 1998)
9. nikolai gogol, the complete tales (vintage, 1999)
10. nathaniel hawthorne, short stories (vintage, 1955)

(we combined two months, so i didn't have 10 photos, so i included the nachos i ate when we met to discuss munro's the beggar maid.)

---

in 2015, i became much more brutal with dropping books because life is too short for books that simply don't hold your interest.  i intentionally dropped 13 books.

1. claire messud, the woman upstairs (knopf, 2013):  so. boring. nothing. happens.
2. cheryl strayed, tiny beautiful things (vintage, 2012):  i started reading this in earnest, but then i skimmed it with a friend, and then i never went back to it.  strayed’s columns are generally hit or miss for me.
3. atul gawande, being mortal (metropolitan books, 2014):  this wasn’t what i was expecting it to be ... though i’m also not entirely sure what i was expecting it to be.  i think i was expecting more profundity, and i wasn’t taken by the writing.
4. renee ahdieh, the wrath and the dawn (putnam, 2015):  omg, the sheer amount of adverbs in this made me want to throttle the book.  i always read with a pencil to mark passages i like or to jot down thoughts, but i read this with a pencil to cross out all the adverbs and circle all the different variations of “said” --  i want to ban her from using a thesaurus ever again.  and limit how many adverbs she's allowed to use.
5. rebecca mead, my life in middlemarch (crown, 2014):  i really liked what i read of this, but i finished middlemarch and didn’t like that that much, so i never did finish the mead.
6. rabih alameddine, an unnecessary woman (grove, 2014):  i just stopped reading this -- like, i put it down for the day and kind of forgot i’d ever started reading it, which was weird because i started reading it on oyster books and liked it enough that i bought the paperback … and then i never went back to it and probably never will.
7. ta-nehisi coates, between the world and me (random house, 2015):  i know; i’m horrible for dropping this; but i did.  i never finished reading it for book club, and i didn’t finish it after book club and have no inclination to pick it up again.
8. jesse ball, a cure for suicide (pantheon, 2015):  this tried too hard to be … whatever the hell it is.
9. virginia woolf, mrs. dalloway (vintage, 1992):  ugh.  i'm sorry, michael cunningham, but UGH.
10. emile zola, thêrèse raquin (penguin, 2010):  given the plot, this is going to sound bizarre, but i was bored to death with this.  it was so predictable.
11. philip weinstein, jonathan franzen (bloomsbury, 2015):  given my unabashed, vocal love for franzen, you’d think i’d be all over this, but, as it turns out -- and i say this in the most non-creepy way possible -- i know way too much about franzen’s bio already.  also, my brain kept going off in all sorts of directions because it’s already full with my own critical analyses of franzen, and weinstein’s writing is very flat.  one day, i'll write about franzen.
12. shirley jackson, we have always lived in the castle (penguin, 2006):  so. boring. nothing. happens.
13. nathaniel hawthorne, short stories (vintage classics, 2011):  (no comment.)

---

in 2015, i took a lot of photos of books with food, and i am not going to count them all.  here are 5 i randomly chose so that i'd have 7 "in 2015"s instead of 6.

---

and that's all, folks!  stay tuned for my year-end recap coming ... at some point in the next two weeks.  >:3  happy new year!

38 in 2015!

i went to 38 book events this year and did a lot of hearing authors twice.  i heard kazuo ishiguro twice, jenny zhang twice, jonathan galassi twice, patricia park twice, marie mutsuki mockett twice, meghan daum twice, jonathan franzen twice (and i’m still kind of kicking myself about that because i should’ve just gone to the b&n event, too), and the anomaly to that is that i heard lauren groff three times because she was on two of the panels i attended at the brooklyn book festival* before i went to hear her at bookcourt.

(* i counted the brooklyn book festival as one event for my tally of events attended.  i did count the two talks [toni morrison and patti smith] i attended at the new yorker festival as two events, though.)

mcnally jackson and bookcourt are tied with 7 events attended at each, followed by greenlight and housing works with 4, then the 92Y with 3 and AAWW with 2.  11 events were attended at other locations.

not too shabby, i say.  in 2016, i shall endeavor to attend more!  :3

thoughts.

01.  i think i will do a big post of all the books i've dropped this year because i've dropped quite a few books this year.  i'm wondering if i want to get going on that post now or if i ought to wait until the end of the year because it's only the beginning of october -- i still have three months to drop more books.

02.  over the weekend, i attended two events at the new yorker festival -- toni morrison with hilton als and patti smith with david remnick -- and i was planning on writing them up as usual, but i don't think i will because, one, there's no need and, two, i'm rethinking event write-ups in general and whether or not i will continue doing them at all.  (i probably will not.)  (not that i've been very good about doing them, anyway.  there are many more events i've attended that i haven't written up here, even though i have notes.)

the guardian did a write-up of morrison's talk -- you can find it here if you're interested.  lithub also transcribed the franzen event with wyatt mason from september 26 if you're interested in that, too.  the new yorker should be posting videos of its festival events soon, so you should be able to watch the patti smith talk -- and you most definitely should if you can.  she had a great conversation with david remnick, read from m train, and did a little surprise at the end.

03.  i'm going to see keira knightley in her broadway debut in the stage adaptation of thérèse raquin tomorrow and hearing margaret atwood on friday!  yey!

july + august + september reads!

apparently, three months is the charm.

thirty-eight.  margaret atwood, the handmaid's tale (HMH, 1986) (via oyster books).

she did not believe he was a monster.  he was not a monster, to her.  probably he had some endearing trait:  he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak.  how easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.  what an available temptation. (ch. 24)

creepy, creepy, creepy — margaret atwood’s dystopia made me think of something edan lepucki said at a recent event for the paperback of california, that, when she was coming up with the dystopia in california, she thought of all the things that were going wrong in our world today and simply imagined up how the world might look years from now if we continued on this same trajectory.  atwood’s dystopia creeps me out for the same reason — the world featured in the handmaid’s tale is not a wholly unimaginable or inconceivable one.

not only that, but offred also isn’t a character who was born into that society — she was there for the change, the transition, and she remembers life from before she lost her job, had her account frozen, was put in a red robe and tasked with sleeping with a married man for the sake of conception.  god, it makes me shudder just thinking about that, though the real terrifying part of this is that there are societies out there women are thusly repressed (women aren’t allowed to read in gilead) and valued solely/principally for their ability to spawn and meet the needs/demands of men.

that said, i must confess that i really was not keen on the ending, that last bit that’s meant to be an academic study.  i felt it was unnecessary and a little jarring, actually.

thirty-nine.  michael cunningham, the hours (FSG, 1998).

yes, clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over.  we throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes.  we live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep — it’s as simple and ordinary as that.  a few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself.  there’s just this for consolation:  an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult.  still, we cherish the city, the morning:  we hope, more than anything, for more.  (225)

cunningham writes with so much heart and so much love.  there’s a lovely quiet to the hours, a steadiness that gets disturbed as you get deeper into the book, into the lives of these three women’s lives.  on the surface, they each want such simple things, but nothing is quite so simple — it makes me think of what cunningham said at his lecture at columbia earlier this year, that there’s no such thing as plot, just characters trying to get something they want with some kind of force preventing them from getting it.

it’s been a while since i read the hours, so i admit to being fuzzy on specifics — the hours left in its wake a lovely, hazy feeling, though, and i remember it fondly, something i find to be common amongst books i’ve loved but have only read once.  my book club is reading the hours for our october read, though, so i do plan on reading it again next month!

one distinct thing, though, that i remember disliking:  there were two of three parts i found jarring because we’re removed from the POV of the three main women.  i loved the narrow focus on the women, and i felt myself shaken from the novel in those moments we’re taken away from them — because it only happens a few times, it’s quite startling.

forty.  margaret atwood, the heart goes last (nan a. talese, 2015).

then he’s unconscious.  then he stops breathing.  the heart goes last.  (70)

again, one of the disadvantages of waiting three months to write reviews is that, well, it’s been three months.

after i finished the heart goes last, i instagrammed, “trust margaret atwood to deliver your regular dose of what-the-fucks with smart social commentary, dry humor, and a dystopia that could be right around the corner.”  i didn’t love it effusively, but i enjoyed it — devoured it in twenty-four hours, actually.  i love the title, though.  and can’t wait to hear her read/speak in a week!

forty-one.  jeffrey eugenides, the virgin suicides (picador, 1993).

we couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.  (243)

two things:

(one)  this is a case where rereading produces an unfavorable change in opinion.  i loved this a whole lot when i first read it a few years ago (It was also one those rare instances of liking the movie as much, too), but i had a lot of problems with it this time around.  for one, i felt like i was floating over the narrative the whole time (a similar problem i had with middlesex), and, for another, it lacked introspection, but, most of all, i was creeped out by the lack of self-awareness that would have mitigated the stalking and voyeurism.

i’m not saying that literature shouldn’t creep us out.  literature should disturb us, take us into depths we wouldn’t normally descend, but we’re supposed to be getting the virigin suicides in the past.  the narrative we is grown-up now; they’re middle-aged, looking back on their youth; but they haven’t grown up — there’s frankly no depth, and the romanticizing of their creepy behavior did not sit nicely with me at all.

i also was never convinced of the narrative “we” and its “reportage” — for the former, the “we” would fade into an omniscient third-person from time-to-time, giving us stories that were either imagined or being recalled and narrated for the reader, neither of which i was convinced was the case.  (inconsistent narrative voice is, apparently, a thing that bothers me a lot.)  as for the latter, i simply wasn’t convinced that they could get the access they could.

(two)  only a man could have written this book.  i’m not saying that’s inherently good or bad, simply that it is.

forty-two.  helen macdonald, h is for hawk (grove/atlantic, 2015) (via oyster books).

gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go.  i’d wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk white lost.  some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn’t work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams.  and that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father.  his death had been so sudden.  there had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all.  he could only be lost.  he was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead.  i know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world.  i’d wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.  (ch. 23)

i LOVED this.

the premise of the book is simple:  after the sudden death of her father, macdonald learns to fly a goshawk.  it’s a beautiful book about grief, full of heart and mourning and love, whether for her father, for her hawk, mabel, or for the greater world around her and the history that came before.  macdonald’s writing is sparse and raw and honest, and i simply loved this book.  it’s one of those loves that leaves me coming up empty when trying to write about it, but i loved it and highly, highly recommend it.

(i did think there was a bit too much about t.h. white, but, overall, i liked how she wove his story into her own.)

here’s another passage just because:

of all the lessons i’ve learned in my months with mabel this is the greatest of all:  that there is a world of things out there — rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly.  they are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world.  in my time with mabel i’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.  and i have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it.  goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities.  their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.  (ch. 29)

forty-three.  richard lloyd parry, people who eat darkness (FSG, 2012) (via oyster books).

i thought a lot of things while devouring people who eat darkness, but i still have no idea how to articulate any of it.  i had a lot of rage, a lot of anger at this patriarchal world and its double standards of women, that much i can say.

here are three long-ish passages instead.

anne allison writes, “there is something dirty about [the hostess], the sexuality she evokes, and the world of the mizu shōbai she represents.  all of this sexual dirtiness, in turn, makes the woman who works in this world ineligible for respectable marriage, ineligible therefore to become a respectable mother with legitimate children … in a culture where motherhood is considered ‘natural’ for women, the mizu shōbai woman is constructed as a female who transgresses her nature.  for this she is degraded; for this, however, she is also enjoyed.”  (ch. 6)

and

surrounded by powerful and aggressive neighbors, korea had been a battlefield throughout its history.  as far back as the sixteenth century, samurai armies had plundered the peninsula, returning across the narrow strait of tsushima with treasures, slaves, and the severed ears of slaughtered korean warriors.  japan began to dominate korea once again at the end of the nineteenth century; in 1910, the country was formally annexed into the emerging japanese empire.  the colonizers built roads, ports, railways, mines, and factories, introduced modern agricultural methods, and sent the children of the korean elite to be educated in tokyo.  but whatever good japanese power brought in the form of economic development was eclipsed by the racism, coercion, and violence of the imperial occupation.

the policies of the japanese administration shifted over time.  but by the late 1930s, its goal was not merely to control koreans and exploit their resources but also to dissolve their culture and colonize their minds.  the japanese language was made compulsory in schools; students were required to worship at shinto shrines, and koreans were encouraged to take japanese names.  infrequent uprisings were quelled with arrests, torture, and killings.  and a vast and unequal human exchange took place, as japanese bureaucrats and settlers were shipped over to govern and farm the new lands, and poor koreans sailed in the opposite direction to find work in the industrial cities of tokyo, osaka, and fukuoka.

at first, this migration was voluntary, but as the pacific war turned against japan, its colonial subjects were forcibly conscripted, both by the imperial army and civilian industry.  by 1945, hundreds of thousands of koreans were scattered across asia with the japanese forces, as soldiers, orderlies, camp guards, and military sex slaves (the “comfort women” whose existence was officially denied for almost fifty years).  in japan itself there were two million zainichi, most of them concentrated in ghettos close to the the mines and factories where they were set to work.  as much as anything, it was the sudden presence of so many foreigners in the motherland that showed up the hypocrisy of japanese colonialism.  (ch. 14)

and

the most serious failure of the police was in not identifying and bringing obara to justice years before.  katie vickers, for one, had reported him in 1997; she was ignored.  how many others, who have never told their stories publicly, experienced similar treatment?  the greatest disgrace had been another five years before that, when the police dismissed the suspicions of carita ridgway’s family about “nishida,” the man who brought their dying daughter to hospital.  the failure was one of imagination, an institutional inability to think other than in clichés.  people were types, and types were to be relied upon.  the young hostess who went to a customer’s place and then claimed rape must be trying it on; the respectable chap who talked of a bad oyster and food poisoning was to be believed. (ch. 24)

forty-four.  lois lowry, the giver (HMH, 1993) (via oyster books).

“the worst part of holding the memories is not the pain.  it’s the loneliness of it.  memories need to be shared.”  (the giver, ch. 20)

the giver was one of my favorite childhood books, but i was much less enthralled by it this time.  i still love the premise of it, this dystopian world where everything is controlled and tightly managed, but i think i wanted more — more conflict, more tension, more ending.

also, i watched the trailer for the film adaptation after i finished rereading it, and what the fuck?  good job taking all the layers of the giver and reducing it to your generic dystopian YA flick, cold tones, stupid romance, and all?

forty-five.  stephen chbosky, the perks of being a wallflower (mtv books, 1999) (via oyster books).

i had an amazing feeling when i finally held the tape in my hand.  i just thought to myself that in the palm of my hand, there was this one tape that had all of these memories and feelings and great joy and sadness.  right there in the palm of my hand.  and i thought about how many people have loved those songs.  and how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs.  and how many people enjoyed good times with those songs.  and how much those songs really mean.  (december 7, 1991)

i couldn’t sleep one night, so i finally read this.  i liked it more than i thought i would, but the most surprising thing to me was how the film captured the exact tone and mood of the book.  i’ve seen the film several times (idk, i liked the film, awkward american accent by emma watson and all), and its’s one of those instances where the film didn’t ruin the reading experience — like, i actually didn’t mind have the actors’ faces in my head.  it kind of made the reading experience more enjoyable in a way.  (i felt the same about the virgin suicides.)  i guess it shouldn’t be much surprising given that chbosky wrote and directed the film adaptation, but, regardless, crossing mediums isn’t something that’s always done so seamlessly, so props!

forty-six.  laline paull, the bees (harpercollins, 2014) (via oyster books).

“then kindly remember that variation is not the same as deformity.” (sister sage, ch. 3)

i wondered about my tendency to read books about animals as allegories (not that i read many books about animals), so, when i started reading the bees, i deliberately, intentionally refused to read it as such, and what a delight it was!

(if the author meant it to be allegorical, i apologize.)

the bees was one of the weirder, more engrossing reading experiences i’ve had — like, i-missed-my-subway-stop level of engrossing.  we follow a worker bee through the ranks of bees — first as a nurse, as a forager, and so on — and it’s a fascinating world, the hive.  it’s hierarchical, with the bees divided into their different roles, and there’s also a cult-ish feel to it, the way the queen is so revered.

i feel like there could be a greater social commentary present, but i admit that i took the dumb reader route to this because i was resisting an allegorical reading and because it’s also that engrossing.  i randomly came across this on oyster, and i’m glad i read it!

forty-seven.  lauren groff, fates and furies (riverhead, 2015).

because it’s true:  more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life.  the hundreds of times she’d dug in the soil of her garden, each time the satisfying chew of spade through soil, so often that this action, the pressure and release and rich dirt smell, delineated the warmth she’d found in that house in the cherry orchard.  or this:  every day they woke in the same place, her husband waking her up with a cup of coffee, the cream still swirling into the black.  almost unremarked upon, this kindness.  he would kiss her on the crown of her head before leaving, and she’d feel something in her rising through her body to meet him.  these silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions or spectacular fucks.  (389)

groff’s prose is exquisite, and one of my favorite things about this book was its structure.  it’s broken into two parts, the first (“fates”) being strictly linear and the second (“furies”) jumping around in time and poking holes in everything we’d learned (or thought we’d learned) in “fates.”

“furies” was awesome.  i loved mathilde; nothing about her life was as expected; and i loved the ways she’s a survivor.  

i wasn’t as fond of “fates,” which is why i wasn’t as effusive about the novel as i thought i might be.  “fates” felt a little too long, trapped by the strict linearity, like we had to flip through these pages to get to the interesting part — in that way, it did feel like “fates” was clearly foundation-building to give us the necessary backdrop for “furies” to start puncturing.  one example of this is the section in “fates” that follows lotte and mathilde in their first new york city apartment.  it’s built of short segments of gatherings that are meant to show us the passage of time, and it’s written beautifully, yes, but, after a while, it started to feel a little too convenient, a little tedious.

also, frankly, lotte wasn’t that interesting, and i had no sympathy for or connection with him.  he’s kind of pathetic, and not in any endearing way, and then he acted pathetically to mathilde near the end of “fates,” and i would’ve been fine if we got less of him and more of mathilde.

because “furies.”  “furies” makes “fates” worth it.

forty-eight.  cristina henriquez, the book of unknown americans (knopf, 2014).

when i walk down the street, i don’t want people to look at me and see a criminal or someone that they can spit on or beat up.  i want them to see a guy who has just as much right to be here as they do, or a guy who works hard, or a guy who loves his family, or a guy who’s just trying to do the right things.  i wish just one of those people, just one, would actually talk to me, talk to my friends, man.  and yes, you can talk to us in english.  i know english better than you, i bet.  but none of them even want to try.  we’re the unknown americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them.  and who would they hate then?

it’s fucked up.  the whole thing is very, very complicated.  i mean, does anyone ever talk about why people are crossing?  i can promise you it’s not with some grand ambition to come here and ruin everything for the gringo chingaos.  people are desperate, man.  we’re talking about people who can’t even get a toilet that works, and the government is so corrupt that when they have money, instead of sharing it, instead of using of using it in ways that would help their own citizens, they hold on to it and encourage people to go north instead.  what choice do people have in the face of that?  like they really want to be tied to the underside of a car or stuff dingo a trunk like a rug or walking in nothing but some sorry-ass sandals through the burning sand for days, a bottle of hot water in their hands?  half of them ending up dead, or burned up so bad that when someone finds them, their skin is black and their lips are cracked open?  another half of them drowning in rivers.  and half after that picked up by la migra and sent back to where they came from, or beaten, or arrested.  the women raped in the ass.  and for what?  to come here and make beds in a hotel along the highway?  to be separated from their families?  (237-8)

this might be the expected reaction, but my main thought as i was reading the book of unknown americans was, god, see, this is why we need diverse books.

this is a beautifully written book.  it’s in multiple POVs, though, narratively, we principally follow a family that’s come from mexico to delaware so the daughter can attend a school for kids with special needs, and there’s a whole lot of heart in these pages.  one of my favorite things about it is that henriquez doesn’t try to soften the reality but, more importantly, doesn’t lose the novel to it.  she talks openly about immigrants and the discrimination they face, but the story isn’t lost to a political agenda or a social “purpose” — and i greatly appreciated that, given how easy it would have been to go the other way.

i highly recommend this.

forty-nine.  jonathan franzen, purity (FSG, 2015).

around scotts valley, the dear fog appeared, and suddenly the season was different, the hour less determinate.  most weekends in june, a great paw of pacific fog reached into santa cruz, over the wooden roller coaster, along the stagnant san lorenzo, up through the wide streets where surfers lived, and into the redwoods on the hills.  by morning the ocean’s outward breath condensed in dew so heavy that it ran in gutters.  and this was one santa cruz, this ghostly gray late-rising place.  when the ocean inhaled again, midmorning, it left behind the other santa cruz, the optimistic one, the sunny one; but the great paw lurked offshore all day.  toward sunset, like a depression following euphoria, it rolled back in and muted human sound, closed down vistas, made everything very local, and seemed to amplify the barking of the sea lions on the underpinnings of the pier.  you could hear them from miles away, their arp, arp, arp a homing call to family members still out diving in the fog.  (66-7)

(god, franzen’s passages about california made my face go all :SLKJ:LSJDFSDF.)

truth be told, there are few authors who deliver books of sheer enjoyment and joy like franzen does.  it’s not news that i’m a huge fan of franzen or that i was looking forward to purity since it was announced last november, and i had to stamp down a lot of my anticipation, so i could go into purity without that baggage.  i also actively avoided any and all reviews and most interviews (which is usually the case with most books), and i still haven’t read many of them (reviews) because i admit to being fatigued by the same old noise around franzen.  everyone knows what opinion to have of him, so little of interest or depth is said anymore, which is unfortunate but unsurprising.

it’s also a little funny because purity made me think that here is a man who loves and cares for people and the world.  he thinks deeply about it, and he writes affectionately and thoughtfully of it.  sure, he puts his characters in unsavory and/or extreme situations, and he doesn’t write kindly of mothers, and his women aren’t always “likable” or “nice,” but, you know, i tend to like his women most of his characters, and that was no different in purity.

it took me a bit to get fully into purity because it really is tonally different from the corrections and freedom.  (i lean more towards the side that reads a book within the context of the author’s backlist.)  there was a sort of dissonance in my head, especially during the first two parts of purity, and it wasn’t until i got to “too much information” that i found myself relaxing into the book because there was franzen as i knew and recognized him, which is neither good nor bad and maybe sounds a little bizarre, but one reason i think we love the authors we do is that there is some core that resonates with us, some thing that makes their work knowable and familiar.

although i must also add that the second part, “the republic of bad taste,” was an odd initial read because it had been excerpted in the new yorker (i am vehemently not a fan or supporter of novel excerpts being published in the new yorker) — i actually resented that it had been excerpted because the excerpt was obviously chopped up and cobbled together of parts, and it reads differently (and better) in its whole.

so there was that.

altogether, i loved it.  i got annoyed with all the references to beauty (especially in regards to annagret), and there was a very questionable word choice that took me out of the narrative because i had to be five years old and laugh (if you’ve read it, you know what i’m talking about), but, overall, purity is a more relaxed, happy franzen, one i can get behind, even if it means the anger is gone.  purity is fun — i had a hell of a time reading it, and i liked that it was plot-heavy, while retaining the idealogical and thematic explorations franzen loves, so here’s a big thumbs up from me!

(franzen said in an interview with esquire uk that, “[after] this last novel [purity], i’d been planning not to write a novel again for at least a decade,” to which i say, NO, PLEASE DON’T, i can’t wait another ten years.  T_T)

fifty.  jonathan franzen, the corrections (picador, 2001).

it was the same problem enid had with chip and even gary:  her children didn’t match.  they didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends’ children wanted.  her children wanted radically, shamefully other things.  (121)

the corrections is still my favorite of franzen’s novels, and i was sad after i finished purity because i had no more franzen to read, so i decided to reread the corrections.

at this point, it’s more interesting, to me, to think about what was different in this most recent read.  this was my third time reading the corrections, and i was filled with guilt when i finished reading it this time because, at the moment, i was in a complicated place with my own parents and their wants for me.  as i’ve gotten older, i’ve been thinking more about how parents and children conflict, specifically as we get older and start to become cognizant of our parents as being full human beings, independent of us, while we also try to assert ourselves as full human beings, independent of them.

and i think that’s one reason i love the corrections so.  you can argue that nothing really happens, that there isn’t much of a plot (ha, remember what cunningham said, though?), but i love how it explores the complicated dynamics of family, of parents and children.  parents undoubtedly have expectations for their children; they try to raise them well, provide them with everything they need, open up as many opportunities as they can; but, at one point, sometimes, it all falls apart.  children have minds and wants and desires of their own, and i enjoy how the corrections explores what happens as children grow up and try to be their own people and make shitty decisions and get themselves into absurd situations and fall away from their parents and from each other — but how, in the end, they’re able to come together because they’re family.

i think the korean in me loves this.

i try to be concise when talking about franzen, but that never works.  i don’t know what it is about his books (minus the twenty-seventh city) that i love so — part of it truthfully might be that i will never write the kinds of books he does, and i say this as a good thing (i quite like the kinds of books i write/will write, thank you very much).  there’s something kind of awe-inducing about how full his world is; one review recently talked about how franzen probably knows every little tiny detail about his characters; and i agree and find that impressive in its own way.

and i like that he makes it a priority to give his readers a good time.  i’m not a fan of art for art’s sake, and i disdain that kind of pretension in literature — i want [extremely] well-written, thoughtful, nuanced books, and i’m not here for authors getting lost in their own language or their own selves.

going back to the corrections, though:  i still hate caroline.  and gary.  but i love everyone else, especially denise and alfred, even enid.  and i’m still bummed the HBO adaptation didn’t happen because, god, if there were ever a perfect cast, that was it.

wow, i could talk about franzen for ages.  don’t ever get me started.

fifty-one.  nell zink, mislaid (ecco, 2015) (via oyster books).

because people never grow accustomed to lies.  they either believe them or they don’t.  and a big lie is never forgiven.  the person who told the lie stops existing, and in his place stands a paradox:  the truthful liar.  the person you know for sure would lie to you, because he’s done it before and confessed.  you never, ever believe that person again.  (ch. 4)

halfway into mislaid, i stopped to write myself a note on my iPhone:  i think the thing that puts me off mislaid is that it’s lacking audacity.  it’s too glib, too smooth, that it reads dangerously toes the line of superficiality and flippancy, never mind that zink really is making astute observations about race (and privilege) in america without being weighed down by the fact that she’s white.

and then i finished it, and … i don’t know.  i’m so torn about it, but i don’t know how i’m torn about it.  i didn’t love it, but i didn’t hate it, but neither am i totally indifferent to it?  and i don’t think i liked it, but i also didn’t dislike it — we can do this forever.  i could see the merits in it, but, even when i’d finished the book, i still think that it’s lacking in audacity and risk.  i also further think that it just didn’t go anywhere.  no one learns anything.  no one really changes.  nothing really changes.  nothing really happens.

and yet …?

idk i like nell zink.  i mean, she writes a line like:

she would be the brontë of warm, malarial moors, the dramatist of the great dismal swamp.  (ch. 3)

and she generally seems not to give a fuck (in all the good ways), so there’s that.

fifty-two.  jang eun-jin, no one writes back (dalkey archive press, 2013, published in korea in 2009)

i do, however, like to write when i travel.  written words are less extravagant than photographs and souvenirs, and they are serious and contemplative.  words penned while traveling do not lie; they’re not for showing off, but for making you reflect on, and take care of, yourself.  i dare say that in life, it is when we travel that our minds and hearts are the most open.  it’s a time when we think more than at any other time in our lives.  we may even think of something that we would never have thought of in all our lives.  and so, it would be the loss or the mistake of a lifetime not to write down in words those thoughts which may never have occurred to us.  you can always go back and take pictures, and buy as many souvenirs as you want.  but the thoughts that come to you while you travel will not come back.  when you go back, the feelings and sensations you have will no longer be the ones you had before.  (8)

what a great book to end september on.

it’s been a very heavily white reading year, and i find myself growing exhausted with it.  i’ve been saying for years now that i want to read more from contemporary korean literature, but i’ve admittedly been so lazy about it, falling back on the excuse that a lot of it isn’t translated, which also doesn’t actually work as an excuse because i can read korean.  and, as i learned last year when i read 3/4 of kim young-ha’s most recent novel, i can read fiction in korea better than i thought i could.

when i saw no one writes back at mcnally jackson (one reason i love mcnally jackson is that they actually have a section labelled “korean literature;” it’s not very big; but it’s there!), i had to buy it.  i’d read about it earlier, and i intrigued — the narrator is a 30-something who’s on a journey with his dog, staying in motels and writing letters to people he meets while in transit.  he tells himself he’ll go home when someone writes him back, and, every morning, he calls an old friend to see if he’s received any mail.

it’s a lovely, thoughtful book, and i can’t help but wonder how much better it would read in korean, given how lyrically and hauntingly the korean language captures melancholy.  (the korean language is fucking beautiful.)  i just finished this an hour or so ago, so i’m still processing it, still kind of stunned by it.

jonathan franzen + jonathan franzen!

(both franzen events had no photo policies, so here are three photos of the book.)

it's always such a pleasure to hear franzen read/speak.  i've heard him read/speak several times before, but he seemed much more at ease at these two events and had the audience laughing the whole time.

and before this starts getting weird ...

purity (FSG) is also the most relaxed of his novels, though.  people have been talking a lot about how purity is different from his previous novels, namely the corrections (FSG, 2001) and freedom (FSG, 2010), and i'd agree with them -- purity really is tonally different because it's entirely lacking the anger that pulsed under both the corrections and freedom, that generated a lot of the energy behind those novels.

it's not to say that the corrections and freedom are angry books or that franzen hates all his characters (whenever i hear people say that, i think, wow, you're reading these books all wrong), simply that there is this charge running through those novels, something that's entirely absent in purity.  i think i kind of missed that?  i don't know; there's something so powerful and breathtaking and exhilarating about the corrections; and i admit it took me a bit to adjust to this lighter, happier (michiko kakutani called it "fleet-footed") novel.

then again, i'm also reading it for the second time this month, so.

---

2015.09.24 @ the 92Y (manhattan) with mark greif.

franzen read from three different parts of the book:  the very beginning, a segment from "too much information," and the beginning of "[lelo9n8a0rd]."

• (before reading from "[lelo9n8a0rd]")  "this is set in the past ... back when there were answering machines."
• Q:  was there a part of the novel that was hardest to write?
  • (long silence)  "you get right to the questions i'm most uncomfortable with."
  • on the first person:  it didn't take that long, but i felt about five years older when i was done with it.
  • had to be exaggerated
  • i think what made it hard was that i'd get to a point where i'd think it was so extreme.
  • the general territory of marrying young and very idealistic is not unknown to me.
  • the extremity of it was invented.
  • what surprised me was how much of a sympathy i ended up with for anabel.
• Q:  how did the plot of the book come about?
  • it did develop over time.
  • i'd pictured the east german character forever -- like thirty-five years, i've been thinking about him -- and i'd wanted to write about california.
  • had a really good friend who grew up in east berlin who would be like "no, this isn't plausible"
  • did more research than he would've liked
  • "i'm not a social realist novelist."
• Q:  what are you, jonathan franzen?
  • that's a good question, and i think it's a hard question for the writer him or herself to answer.
  • if there isn't a comic pop in the sentences, i can't write them.
• (about starting on a new project and whether he has it worked out)  "it's an adventure every time."
  • i found myself making the same mistakes as a twenty-three-year-old.
  • it's a groping process still.
• freedom was written after a period of time when i did a lot of bird watching and had a lot of fun for the first time in my adult life.
  • it occurred to me that not many people have gotten away with being a misanthrope and a novelist at the same time.
  • especially with the kind of writing i do, you have to love people.
• the missing nuclear warhead is a placeholder as a reminder that other apocalyptic (material*) are out there.
  • *i can't read my handwriting.
• so maybe purity was a rededication to writing about people.
• what stopped me for six months was i couldn't figure out what tom did.
  • two possibilities he'd dwelt on:  chris cooper-like guy who'd been a character actor; a math whiz and collector of antique computing devices
  • got to know chris cooper by then
• "hollywood has not changed you.  you're still the same guy."
  "it goes both ways.  i haven't changed it."
• i think i know which men i'll be really good friends with the minute i lay my eyes on them.  love at first sight.
• i think i can tell within a few pages if an author is struggling with something or performing.
  • he's reading ferrante's neapolitan novels right now
  • she writes like she's writing into a wound.

---

2015.09.26 @ st. joseph's college (brooklyn) with wyatt mason

• once had to write to the new york times to specify that he wasn't a brooklyn writer (nothing against brooklyn)
• "with herculean forebearance, i don't talk about birds until page 555."
• i always write about readers.
• re:  the first person:  it is a document, and, once i figured out it was a document, was able to figure out how it would work.
  • i thought it was absolutely impossible to take [such a heinous situation] in third person.
  • the kind of laceration that needs to be happening, if it were in third person, the author would seem monstrous.
• re:  patty's document in freedom
  • that was actually in converse because i tried to write a lot of the patty parts in first person.
  • wasn't ironic enough
  • patty was a very angry person.
• maybe the first novel (the twenty-seventh city, FSG, 1988) was a novel of ideas.
• re:  putting these books together
  • it's very much done by instinct.
  • put these titles on these books to force himself to put characters and story around these concepts
• how did the book take the form it did?
  • it came about from a crazy idea.
  • the resolution of pip and her mother was so preposterous, there had to be all this scaffolding built quickly.
  • the book is sort of a packaging for the first-person section.
  • been getting mixed reactions to it
  • some people identify strongly with it, but he thought people who've had smooth relationships might have a hard time with it, so he pushed it back instead of putting it in the front.
• Q:  why don't we hear from anabel?
  • really, one could say you can't hear from everybody.
  • it never even occurred to me to include something from anabel's pov because i think she's such an extreme character with this extreme idealism, and i can't connect with that.
  • Q:  so it's somewhat imaginatively beyond you?
  • not so much that but an inability to love and connect
  • "some characters honestly just work better as objects in characters' lives."
• all my books are the same length.
  • (mason counts off)  568, 562, 563
  • Q:  you have a length.  what does that mean for an author five books in?
  • i struggled to cut this down to this length.
  • i have a fear of inflicting a too-long book on people.
  • 2666 was (long*); i wouldn't do that.
    • * again, can't read my hand-writing ... basically that it's long (2666 is long), but not that it's bad.
  • i've read and enjoyed war and peace many times, so it's not that i'm against [long books] on principle.
• i'm trying to design the books as page turners but also as something that people might want to reread (with motifs and such).
• "fiction is an experience.  that's what it should be, i think."
• i beat myself up as a twenty-year-old who went to europe and didn't write everything down
  • my days when i'm working, which doesn't happen very often, include a lot of packaging.
  • this book was grueling, included one more drink a night than usual, and a lot of gin and tennis.  and television.
  • works 5-6 hours in the morning
• it's hard to imagine readers past thirty-five years into the future because i don't expect to be here past thirty-five years.
  • i do think about how the books will translate -- like, i know there are chinese editions of the books.
  • things start losing relevance almost before they're published.
  • i feel like, i know someone's going to read this now (hence the references to contemporary culture because, essentially, as long as someone gets it now ...)
• my first two novels, i was still so full of the lefty politics i'd breathed in when i was young.
• gave up on politically charged writing during his mid-30s because he started to wonder how he was so sure he was right
• "i think the novel is epistemologically superior to any politics."
• Q about the death of walter's girlfriend in freedom:  if she'd lived, would they have had a future?
  • if she hadn't died, i think they would have gone through some rough times but come out on the other side.
  • the whole book was actually meant to encase that death.
  • had an uncle walter, who was his favorite uncle, whose daughter died in a one-person car crash when she was twenty-two.
  • uncle would tell him about his life, and he promised to tell hi story.
  • uncle walt actually lived long enough (passed away recently) to read the book and got it.
  • i get the conversation that the death was convenient, but it was what i was writing to.
• "do you want a question about sauerkraut or about women?"
  "i love both."
  • "i do love sauerkraut."
  • to this day, i make country ribs and sauerkraut on christmas even.
•  i was a miserably hard-working person until the corrections broke through.