Season’s readings to one and all!
December marked the end of an incredible year (in many senses), and the culmination of a fairly ridiculous few months for me and my newly enlarged family. We looked at the 3 or 4 most life-changing things you can do, and decided to do all of them, at pretty much the same time.
Pack up your entire life into precariously stuffed boxes? Check.
Move cross-country and attempt to find a place to live? Sure.
Go back to school after two decades and try to get a Masters, whilst transferring (or possibly leaving) your job? Done.
And then the minor matter of having a human…
So, this is the first blog coming to you live and direct from our new hometown, New Orleans, Louisiana, where I look forward to reading much more Percy Walker (*edit: I of course meant Walker Percy, as my father-in-law has pointed out since this blog was published, but I like both names so much I’m keeping it in!*) and Tennessee Williams, and re-reading A Confederacy Of Dunces (already a wonderful welcome gift from my extended family here).
In one final fit of New York bookstore shelf-emptying, I finished the month with a total of 27 books bought, (including one of the New York Times Top 10 books of the year, American Prison, an exposé of the penitentiary system in my new adopted home state which I am more than curious to begin), and a dozen read.
I only had time for short stories and plays for the most part, thoroughly enjoying Arthur Miller plays (who knew he’d written more than just Death Of A Salesman? And The Crucible? Oh, and View From The Bridge? Well me, I guess, although I discovered even more after learning that Penguin Plays had released a gorgeous-becovered series of them for Miller’s centenary), and getting through the stack of bedside novellas which have been piling up, (the Tolstoy wonderful, the Gaskell less so).
To continue the theme of yin and yang, I also read two highly critically acclaimed works, Jenny Offill’s ‘Dept.Of Speculation’ and Ben Loory’s collection of (very) short stories, Tales Of Falling And Flying.
The former (a birthday present for my ladywife, which I decided to pre-read for her, in the selfless tradition of royal food tasters) was short, sharp, beautiful and wonderful, despite the depressing subject matter (marital infidelity), which is merely the skeleton Offill uses to drape her sweet, simple prose upon.
Loory’s bite-size surrealism, however, had lured me in with its cover reviews boasting of his ‘whimsical, magical’ fables. Instead, I wished I’d just (re)read some George Saunders or Etgar Keret, or gone back to the source and picked up some Borges. Simplistic rather than simple, repetitive instead of thematic, I haven’t been so disappointed in a book for a while, (especially given how beautifully Penguin had packaged it).
I also felt let down by the Obama-endorsed ‘The Power,’ a parable of a world where women finally take back physical power. A great read for the first part as societies shift to accommodate the new world order, it eventually degenerated into a mess of characters I didn’t really care about having adventures which were far less interesting than the concept as a whole.
I recommend reading the first chapter or so, and making the rest up yourself from there.
Keep your eyes peeled for my now-traditional Review Of The Year In Books coming soon (or if not soon, possibly never, as I begin grad school in 2 weeks…), keep reading, and see y’all in 2019!
Doron, Rachel, and Oscar
Books Bought, December 2018
The Hueys in None The Number (Oliver Jeffers)
Five Children And It (E.Nesbitt)
A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
The Night Of Wishes: or the satanarchaeolidealcohellish notion potion (Michael Ende)
The Price (Arthur Miller)
Broken Glass (Arthur Miller)
Utopia (Thomas Moore)
The Poor Clare (Elizabeth Gaskell)
The Lemoine Affair (Marcel Proust)
The Death Of Ivan Ilyich (Leo Tolstoy)
Parnassus On Wheels (Christopher Morley)
Tales Of Falling And Flying (Ben Loory)
An Outline Of Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)
The Four Loves (C.S.Lewis)
Kusamakura (Natsumei Soseki)
The Romance Of Tristran (Béroul)
Living With Music: ralph ellison’s jazz writings (Ralph Ellison)
The Great Transformation: the beginning of our religious traditions (Karen Armstrong)
The McSweeney’s Joke Book Of Book Jokes (various)
All That Is Evident Is Suspect: readings from the oulipo, 1963-2018 (various)
Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm)
On Writing (Jorge Luis Borges)
The Devil Finds Work (James Baldwin)
An Everlasting Meal (Tamar Adler)
American Prison: a reporter’s undercover journey into the business of punishment (James Bauer)
Babel (Gaston Dorren)
Daisy Miller (Henry James)
Books Read, December 2018 (highly recommended books in bold)
The Power (Naomi Alderman)
Here They Come (Yannick Murphy)
Tales Of Falling And Flying (Ben Loory)
The Tale Of Hong Gildong (anon)
The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
The Price (Arthur Miller)
Broken Glass (Arthur Miller)
The Death Of Ivan Ilyich (Leo Tolstoy)
Dept.Of Speculation (Jenny Offill)
The Poor Clare (Elizabeth Gaskell)
The One Thing: the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results (Gary Keller w/Jay Papasan)
#Sad! doonesbury in the time of trump (G.B.Trudeau)
