THE SECRET COUNTRY

I kicked off this year’s reading with The Secret Country by Pamela Dean. My favorite book when I was 15 (and one that I still frequently reread) was Dean’s Tam Lin, kind of an eggheaded fantasy novel about fantastically bright and well-read liberal-arts college students. (This book, plus Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, formed all of my expectations about college, and I consequently spent my freshman year totally disillusioned by the discovery that my classmates were not all beautiful, brilliant, charismatic people who read Greek and quoted Keats at the drop of a hat. I somehow managed to overlook the fact that the genius Classics majors in Tartt’s book commit two murders, while in Dean’s book the Classics department is run by faeries who lure undergrads into their web of illusions and sterile immortality, and occasionally sacrifice them to hell.) There’s something I love about her Shakespeare-influenced writing style and her prickly, intelligent characters, but she’s only written a handful of other books, and they can be hard to find. The Secret Country trilogy had been out of print, but it’s been recently reissued and appeared at my library, so I warily checked it out. And it’s pretty good—it’s the kind of fantasy I like, grounded in the real world but with fantastic elements, a la Harry Potter, Madeleine L’Engle, etc. Actually, it’s very similar to the Narnia books in that ordinary children are transported to a magical world, only in these books, it’s a world they invented while playing make-believe, and now they find themselves living the stories they made up and acted out, and trying to figure out how it works and what they can change and (of course) how they can get home again. I promptly ordered the whole trilogy from Amazon, which then proceeded to torment me by sending me the third book (The Whim of the Dragon) this week, and not shipping the second one (The Hidden Land), which I am eagerly waiting to read, until next week.

Meanwhile, I’m reading an amusing time-travel novel, Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog. As the title implies, it contains a lot of references to Three Men and a Boat, which I now totally want to reread, in addition to reading more Connie Willis. I don't know whether to find it fun or maddening the way one book keeps leading to another...and another...and when will I ever get to War & Peace at this rate?

2005 IN BOOKS

I read 67 books in 2005. For the 13 years I’ve been keeping track of the books I read, this is exactly the mean number (there were 6 years when I read more than 67 and 6 years when I read fewer). My 2005 reading was divided almost perfectly evenly between fiction (33) and nonfiction (34, 9 of which were about food!). All but 8 of the books were new to me (so much for this Great Rereading Project I keep intending to launch). Many were newly published this year; in fact, only one was published before 1900: Emma, one of my rereads (so much for being a serious reader of the classics—what can I say? I’m easily seduced by the fun and glossy reviews in Entertainment Weekly). But even though it’s tempting to look back at the list and see all the holes in it, all the weighty and important and beloved things I didn’t get around to reading or rereading, I do think I enjoyed and learned from every book I read (even if, I admit, I don’t remember everything I learned). Here are the best, the definite keepers:

10 FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS 2005 (listed in the order I read them)

1. Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food, by Susan Marks
2. Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell
3. The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson
4. Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, by Ruth Reichl (discussed briefly here)
5. The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby
6. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Human Behavior, by Temple Grandin
7. Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell
8. Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak (This is, according to my records, the fifth nonfiction book I’ve read about Nancy Drew, and it’s perhaps the best-written and most comprehensive.)
9. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, by Mary Roach (It’s not quite as focused and revelatory as Roach’s first book, Stiff, but still pretty funny and interesting, and the chapter about ectoplasm—which Victorian mediums often faked by hiding fabric or sheep intestines in their hoo-has—made my jaw drop.)
10. The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, by Dan Savage

10 FAVORITE FICTION BOOKS 2005 (again, in the order I read them)

1. Easter Island, by Jennifer Vanderbes
2. Jamesland, by Michelle Huneven (although I also read Huneven’s Round Rock, a sort of prequel, and loved it almost as much)
3. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
4. Confessions of a Teen Sleuth: A Parody, by Chelsea Cain
5. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
6. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore
7. Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way: A Novel, by Bruce Campbell (Unlike Campbell's first literary effort, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, this is a novel...but the narrator happens to be a B-movie actor named Bruce Campbell. All the details about him are real, but the plot is totally fictional—“Bruce Campbell” gets cast in an A-list movie, gets really excited to do some real acting and does all this pretentious and ludicrous character research, but then slowly and unwittingly infects the production with “B-movieitis,” so it degenerates into a pulpy mess, with Richard Gere all excited about adding in some fight scenes (even though he’s an antiviolence Buddhist, and anyway, it’s supposed to be a romantic comedy) and Mike Nichols doing crazy handheld camera shots. Fluffy, but riotously funny.)
8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling
9. The Virgin Suicides, by Geoffrey Eugenides (Extremely good and if I were still in college I would totally, totally write a paper comparing it to Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, because they are both about the futility of biography and the beautiful obscurity of the unknowable object, and if Eugenides hasn’t read that book I’ll eat my hat. Not that I’m wearing one. OK, I’ll eat my shoe, like Werner Herzog. Anyway, a close runner-up is Eugenides’ Middlesex, which I read earlier in the year. I had a few complaints about some of the more gimmicky narrative flourishes, but it was very epic and fascinating—it’s about a hermaphrodite, after all—and well-written.)
10. On Beauty, by Zadie Smith (I hadn’t been planning to read it—White Teeth was good, but I wasn’t enraptured by it—until I read that it’s an homage to Howards End. I love E.M. Forster and wrote two major college papers on Howards End, so that sealed the deal. And lucky for me, because I quite liked it.)

My parents gave me a special “Books to Check Out” notebook for Christmas, to contain my burgeoning things-I-gotta-read list. I’ve already got several pages filled, and I feel the usual frantic eagerness, overwhelmedness, and guilt bubbling up as I contemplate everything I haven’t read and want to read. Still, I think if I find 20 more books this good in 2006, I’ll be doing just fine.