JANUARY MISCELLANY

January 19: This week, I started reading the last two library books that stand between me and Reading Project 2007. Luckily, they’re both great, so I can’t resent them. At home, I’m reading Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, and as always, marveling at how he conveys his opinions with such clarity and efficiency without sacrificing humor or intelligence or enthusiasm. On my lunch breaks, I’m being steadily amazed by Dave Eggers’ gorgeous, egoless, truly heartbreaking What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achek Deng, a novel based on the true story of a Sudanese refugee. Even if you’re an Eggers hater (I’m not, but I know they’re out there), it’s worth reading.

Though I may not get going on it for another week or so, I’ve posted my 2007 reading list so you can follow along (ha) at home. Also, just in case anyone was waiting for incontrovertible, quantitative proof of my dorkitude, here it is: I have created an Excel bar graph of my annual reading volume for the last 13 years. I don’t know…I was curious, and I had the data, and I like to play with Excel, so why not? Looking at the dips and spikes is pretty funny. Lord knows what I was doing with 106 books in 1994, my junior year of high school—they were just shorter than what I read now, I hope, because I’m pretty sure I had homework, extracurricular activities, a boyfriend, and at least a semblance of a social life at the time. The numbers sink their lowest during my later college years; ironically, I was reading more then than at any other point in my life, but they were massive books (Barnaby Rudge, anyone?) and writing papers about all of them detracted from my recreational reading time. (Still, I managed to hold my own somewhat while working boring jobs during my idle J-terms and summers, much as my dad made his way through thousands of paperbacks, carrying them around in his back pocket, during a stint as a hospital orderly post-college.) The numbers rise after graduation, dip mysteriously in 2003, then become consistently middling starting in 2004, the point at which I moved in with a boy and two cats who can all be highly (though adorably) distracting.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out right now how to paste said graph into this post. Perhaps on Monday, after a weekend of fun (I have many happy social plans, hooray), my mind will be fresher.

January 26: I had a highly uneventful week, mostly due to the fact that I’ve spent all my free time with my nose buried in What Is the What—both because it’s riveting and because I have to return it to the library tomorrow. During the time that I’ve been reading it, it’s been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, an honor it fully deserves. (Also nominated? One of my favorite books of last year, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)

THE READING PROJECT, PHASE 2

THE GOAL: Continue reading all the novels I own but haven't read before.

1. Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen***
2. Switch Bitch, by Roald Dahl***
3. Someone Like You, by Roald Dahl***
4. Eight Further Tales of the Unexpected, by Roald Dahl**
5. The Living, by Annie Dillard****
6. A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle***
7. The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle***
8. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle***
9. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett**
10. The Dain Curse, by Dashiell Hammett***
11. Ripley’s Game, by Patricia Highsmith***
12. The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson****
13. Stanley Park, by Timothy Taylor*
14. The Return of Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse***
15. Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, by P.G. Wodehouse***
16. Spring Fever, by P.G. Wodehouse***
17. The Butler Did It, by P.G. Wodehouse***

* = Didn’t like, didn’t finish
** = OK, but wouldn’t reread
*** = Liked it
**** = Loved it
() = not yet read

THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, PART 3

Finally, I’m just 50 pages from the end of The Mill on the Floss. After long, mildly absorbing depictions of the protagonist’s childhood, Dickensian aunts and uncles, and father’s financial ruin, the story has really taken off in the last stretch. Suddenly, Maggie is torn between (a) her deep affection for the sensitive hunchback her overbearing brother forbids her to see because his father was their father’s nemesis, and (b) her forbidden passion for her cousin’s cocky, frivolous boyfriend. At long last, the Victorian melodrama I crave!

Needless to say, no matter how much I keep urging her to make the smart choice and live a happy life with the nice guy (and tell her annoying brother to go fuck himself), she goes with the forbidden passion, with tragic results. Though what happens is tame by today’s standards (there’s certainly no sex whatsoever—more of an unfortunate misunderstanding), apparently it was so scandalous at the time that (the Oxford World’s Classics edition’s introduction helpfully tells me) “Bertrand Russell’s mother, four years before her marriage, was permitted to read only the first half of The Mill on the Floss. ‘I should have thought Maggie would turn out very well when she was older,’ she wrote to her brother, ‘but I am told that she is so wicked.’” Hee, prudery.

2006 IN BOOKS

I did many things over my weeklong holiday break, but I did not, to my very great shame, get anywhere near the end of The Mill on the Floss. Even after an intensive (and surprisingly absorbing) 100-page cram session on the airplane on December 31, I still have 200 pages left to go. But the joy of setting arbitrary goals for oneself is that when they aren’t accomplished, there are no real consequences. I will persevere, I will finish eventually, I will read a few library books I foolishly placed on hold right before Christmas, and then I’ll get started on the whopping 21 (!) books on the Phase 2 list (to be posted soon).

Speaking of books, here are my favorites of 2006—not necessarily the best-quality books I read, mind you, but the ones that had the most impact on me, the ones I know I’d want to read again.

TEN FAVORITE FICTION BOOKS 2006 (in no particular order)

1. The Secret Country trilogy (The Secret Country, The Hidden Land, and The Whim of the Dragon), by Pamela Dean
2. To Say Nothing of the Dog (mentioned briefly here), Doomsday Book, Lincoln’s Dreams, and Passage, by Connie Willis (I’m calling this a tie, to avoid half my list being Connie Willis books)
3. Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes
4. Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger
5. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey (mentioned in passing here)
6. Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov
7. Triangle, by Katharine Weber (A fascinating novel about a survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. I read it in about a day, it was so horrifying and heartbreaking and suspenseful. I’ve found I really love books [Possession, Easter Island, To Say Nothing of the Dog] in which mysteries of the past impinge upon the present.)
8. The Boy Detective Fails, by Joe Meno (Though very poorly copyedited—I know it’s from a small press, but even with limited editorial resources I expect someone to remember to run spell check—it was otherwise great: a unique, tender, sad, surreal, often funny riff on the Hardy Boys/Scooby Doo kid sleuthing genre. It actually reminded me somehow of The Royal Tenenbaums with its fantastically-talented-child-prodigies-become-depressed-adults-searching-for-love-and-meaning theme, and I decided any movie adaptation should be handled by Wes Anderson.)
9. The End, by Lemony Snicket
10. The Grass Harp, by Truman Capote
11. Honorable mention: Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. I wanted to like this book a bit more than I actually did, but bonus points for trying and being pretty compelling.
    

Pickings were slimmer in nonfiction (I read less of it, and some of what I read was throwaway material—anthologies like The Best American Magazine Writing that were enjoyable but left little trace in my mind), so I only chose half as many books.

FIVE FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS 2006 (in no particular order)

1. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, by Laura Shapiro
2. Two for the Road: Our Love Affair With American Food and Roadfood, by Jane and Michael Stern
3. Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash, by Liz Perle
4. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan
5. College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now, Lynn Peril (Entertaining and informative; I enjoy Peril’s “Museum of Femorabilia” column in BUST, own and love her first book, Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons, eagerly awaited the arrival of College Girls at my public library, was the first person to check it out, and thoroughly enjoyed it—except for the back cover, where her bio says, “Lynn Peril is the author of Pink Think: How to Become a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons.” Yeah. W.W. Norton got the title wrong. The title of a book they published. Demerits! Poor Lynn Peril.)
6. Honorable mention: No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog, by Maggie Mason. I didn’t read it straight through, word for word, so it doesn’t officially count, but trust me, it’s good. Great title, too.