The Gods Have Been Kind: Return of the NYTBR Post

In spite of self’s having had just two hours of sleep last night (She fell asleep on couch and woke up just after midnight to find herself alone in the living room, with flashing Christmas tree lights, blaring TV and snoring doggies), self does not have any apparent eye bags. Yesterday, self was chatting to Dear Cuz in Virginia (who had just sent over a tin of Food for the Gods, yummy yummy for self’s tummy) and complaining about her muffin belly.  “You do not have a muffin belly,” cuz declared, stoutly.  “Plus, I’m bald,” self said.  On that particular point, cousin refrained from comment.

This morning, self decided to bite the bullet and resume her subscription to The New York Times Book Review (which ran out in June).  After being directed hither and thither, self knew she had finally arrived at the right place when the man who came on the line had an unmistakable Noo Yawk accent.

Self then learned that, sometime around the time when self’s six-year subscription expired, last summer, the cost of the subscription had gone up by 50%.  It used to be $65/year, and today self learned it was $91.  That.did.give.her.pause.  Especially since she was staring into the black and silent maw of floor furnace, which last Friday had mysteriously decided to give up the ghost.

But, nothing ventured, nothing gained!  Self grit her teeth and told the salesman, “Go ahead!  Make my day!”  No, what self really said was, “Put it on my Visa!”

So, the first issue should be arriving sometime next week.  In the meantime, here is self with last Sunday’s issue (Dec. 14), ready to post about the books she is interested in reading:

(1)   After reading the list of “10 Best Books of 2008,” (which of course includes Roberto Bolaño’s 2666), self is interested in reading the following:

• Joseph O’Neill’s “seductive” novel, Netherland
• Jhumpa Lahiri’s new story collection, Unaccustomed Earth
• New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War
• Drew Gilpin Faust’s “powerful” This Republic of Suffering:  Death and the American Civil War

(2)   After reading Tom McCarthy’s review of Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Touissant’s Camera:

• Jean-Philippe Touissant’s Camera

(3)   After reading Sophie Gee’s review of Philip Hensher’s multigenerational epic, The Northern Clemency:

• Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency

(4)   After reading Marilyn Stasio’s “Crime” column, the following mysteries:

• P. D. James’ latest, The Private Patient
• James Church’s Bamboo and Blood
• Elizabeth Ironside’s A Good Death

Eavesdropping: Salon Book Awards 2008

Salon.com just announced their 2008 Book Awards.  Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is on it, of course.

Here are the books self is interested in reading after perusing Salon’s list of five fiction and five non-fiction winners:

• Tana French’s The Likeness:  “Ostensibly a detective novel, French’s follow-up to her 2007 novel, In the Woods is, like that earlier book, wilfully disobedient to the dictates of genre . . . “
• Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances:   “In Galchen’s wryly elegant tale, Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist, suddenly decides that his beloved wife, Rema, has been replaced by a near-perfect impostor.”
• Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency:  “This sprawling, satirical novel of intersecting suburban families is set in Sheffield, England, from 1974 to the mid-90s, and its author is firmly committed to reproducing the textures of that world, from the pretentious hors d’oeuvres served by an aspiring middle-class housewife (“mushroom vol-au-vents”) to the white formica and smoked brown glass of a neighbor’s furniture “unit.”
• Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher:  A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective:   “Part true-crime narrative, part cultural history, Summerscale’s exploration of a notorious case of child-murder in 1860 is above all an inquiry into our lasting fascination with detectives and detective stories.”

Books Self Loved in 2008

Without further ado, dear blog readers, here is the list of the best books self has read (so far) in 2008, the books that made self laugh, cry, gnash her teeth in rage, or do all three simultaneously.  This year, self’s list includes four memoirs, two anthologies (Field of Mirrors and The Friend Who Got Away), two novels, three non-fiction, one short story collection, and two poetry collections!

Caveat:  Only the poetry collections and Krysl’s Dinner with Osama are new books.  Field of Mirrors is “semi-new”(!!):  came out last year!

• Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn’s 102 Minutes:  The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
• Mariane Pearl’s A Mighty Heart
• Marilyn Krysl’s Dinner with Osama
  
• Dave Sedaris’ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
• Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem
• Field of Mirrors, edited by Edwin Lozada
  
• Lorraine Adams’ Harbor
• Luisa Igloria’s Juan Luna’s Revolver
  
• Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of It All
  
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
  
• Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul
• R. Zamora Linmark’s The Evolution of a Sigh
  
• The Friend Who Got Away, edited by Jenny Ofill and Elissa Schappel
  
• Jonathan Ames’ Wake Up, Sir!

Strangely, self’s students at xxxx community college absolutely detested Harbor (they claimed for its graphic violence, which surprised self exceedingly).

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

Books: A Very Very Short List (From The New Yorker “Food Issue”) and a Couple More

Day before Thanksgiving, son is home. Self fell asleep with the same peace and contentment she felt on the night when Obama won. On p. 361 of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Santa Sofia de la Piedad starts imagining elves in the house of the Buendias. Meanwhile, here’s a short list of books self is interested in reading after perusing the “Briefly Noted” section of The New Yorker “Food Issue”: 24 November 2008

Bee Wilson’s Swindled
“With the revelations in recent months of tainted food — salmonella-infected jalapeños, melamine-laced milk — Wilson’s latest treatise, on contaminated, adulterated, and fake foods in the modern era, feels almost prophetic.”

Susan Pinkard’s A Revolution in Taste
“Pinkard relishes debunking persistent myths: champagne was not invented by a Benedictine monk named Dom Perignon but, rather, caught on thanks to the invention and diffusion of the modern wine bottle. Her lively account concludes with a series of meticulously sourced ancien-régime recipes demonstrating the finesse with which French food is now synonymous.”

* * * *

After reading James Wood’s review of Rivka Galchen’s first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances (in the June 23, 2008 New Yorker), the following works, all featuring spectacularly unstable narrators:

Georg Buchner’s story, “Lenz”
Knut Hamsun’s Hunger
Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno
Thomas Bernhard’s “devastating” The Loser
Rivka Galchen’s first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances

Aaargh: Self Shouldn’t Have, But She Did

Self knows she should be grading papers.

She is an adult, she knows the meaning of responsibility. (And she has already posted twice today, thereby breaking her self-imposed limit of TWO posts a day. For one must live, one must not constantly be checking blog stats, etc etc)

But here she is, lost in the thicket of a fellow wordpress blogger, who has undertaken to list “Dr. Peter Boxall’s List of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.”

Who is Dr. Peter Boxall? Self has no idea. But, unable to resist the siren call of yet another book list, self has allowed her eyes to meander down, down, down, down — and, before she knows it, she is trapped! She has left a comment on this blogger’s blog! And she must then post on her blog about the list! And because self is so astonished that this blogger actually listed 1,000 books in one post, she is filled with boundless awe, admiration, and gratitude!

Of numbers 1 – 100 on this list. Self did the magical “cut and paste”, thereby saving her fingers for any writing she might feel like doing later, should the creative bug happen to bite (and self sincerely hopes that it does). Titles in bold are the books self has read. Self is so excited that Fingersmith (by Sarah Waters) is on this list, and also ex-Stanford classmate Jeffrey Eugenides (for Middlesex, of course), and that J. M. Coetzee’s Youth, a book self read just last year, is here as well. And of course she loves W. G. Sebald. And how curious that she is about to start teaching The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at xxxx community college tomorrow.

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Saturday – Ian McEwan
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
The Sea – John Banville
The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
The Master – Colm Tóibín
Vanishing Point – David Markson
The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Colour – Rose Tremain
Thursbitch – Alan Garner
The Light of Day – Graham Swift
What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Islands – Dan Sleigh
Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
The Double – José Saramago
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Unless – Carol Shields
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
In the Forest – Edna O’Brien
Shroud – John Banville
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Youth – J.M. Coetzee
Dead Air – Iain Banks
Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
Platform – Michael Houellebecq
Schooling – Heather McGowan
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini
The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
Fury – Salman Rushdie
At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
Under the Skin – Michel Faber
Ignorance – Milan Kundera
Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
City of God – E.L. Doctorow
How the Dead Live – Will Self
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
Pastoralia – George Saunders
Timbuktu – Paul Auster
The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson (have gotten part-way through this like 3 times)
As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
Another World – Pat Barker
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Great Apes – Will Self
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey

Perusing THE ECONOMIST’S Books of the Year 2007

Books self is interested in reading after perusing The Economist’s Books of the Year 2007 :

Biography

Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, by Linda Lear

A spunky, humorous woman who fought conventional Victorian family expectations to lead an independent life as an artist, businesswoman and conservationist.

Edith Wharton, by Hermione Lee

Money, status, marriage and divorce: all became grist to the mill of the turn-of-the-century American writer whom Henry James called “the great generalissima.”

History

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner

A survey of the agency’s failures since its founding in 1947, which concludes that the world’s most powerful country has yet to develop a first-rate spy service.

The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England, by Adrian Tinniswood

Meet the family that was involved in cheesemaking, sword-buying and scandal-mongering — as well as the English civil war, the Great Fire of London and the coronation of William and Mary.

Politics and Current Affairs

Gomorrah: A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System, by Roberto Saviano

A national bestseller in Italy that traces the decline of Naples as construction, fashion, drugs and the disposal of toxic waste all fell under the systematic control of organised crime.

Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe, by Judith Garfield Todd

A harrowing tale of courage and betrayal by a white heroine of the liberation struggle against Ian Smith who has been punished (and stripped of her citizenship) with extraordinary vengefulness by Robert Mugabe for speaking out about the regime’s abuses of power.

Fiction and Memoirs

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling

Books written as part of a series that start well almost invariably fall off in quality. Not so the seventh and last HP, the end of the decade’s most successful morality tale, which shows J. K. Rowling at the height of her magical imaginative powers.

The Septembers of Shiraz, by Dalia Sofer

A successful jeweler and gem merchant, patronised by the Tehran aristocracy and the wife of the shah, is arrested by two armed Revolutionary Guards. His wife searches frantically for him, while in prison he asks himself how he can survive. A powerful depiction of a prosperous Jewish family in Iran shortly after the revolution.

Mr. Pip, by Lloyd Jones

A young girl finds escape through the pages of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” thanks to the efforts of a new teacher who is drafted into the local village school during the 1990 blockade of the Melanesian island of Bougainville. The cadences of Pacific vernacular make spare, moving prose.

The Ghost, by Robert Harris

A racy political thriller that has earned its high sales in Britain, “The Ghost” is the tangled story of a former British prime minister, a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, and his wife and political adviser. Brilliantly persuasive, right up to the last page of its astonishing and unpredictable conclusion.

The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett

Witty and urbane, physically tiny and charming, this account of Queen Elizabeth II discovering the work of J. R. Ackerley, Jean Genet, Ivy Compton-Burnett and other writers is a Swiftian tirade against stupidity and philistinism, and a passionate argument for the civilising power of art.

Culture and Digressions

Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid
The roaring, intemperate missives of one of England’s great primitives.

New York Times Book Review: 10 Best Books of 2006

Four hours of sleep, tremendous eyebags. Today, must exercise extreme caution to avoid being sighted by friends, neighbors, and, most important, students.

Checked e-mail religiously over the weekend, saw no missives from little darlings, must not yet have seen their grades, which I posted late Saturday evening, after returning from viewing of terrible Apocalypto movie with hubby.

Computer absolutely loathsome this morning, hardly deserves to be referred to as a “computer” when could not manage to peck out more than one sentence at a time before freezing. Re-started 17 times. Cursed passionately (Not, however, with as much profanity as the young woman I beheld in the Redwood City Library yesterday who screamed and yelled F—! F—! F—! at each stab of the return key. Library patrons, however, the soul of patience: no one even so much as glanced up from their computer screens. My heart, however, was thudding painfully in my chest.)

Eventually, son vacates the premises and I am able to log on from his computer. Such dedication I have for you, loyal blog readers! Following, the list of books I am interested in reading after perusing the New York Times Book Review‘s annual list of best books of the year:

FICTION

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children
Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics

NONFICTION

Danielle Trussoni’s Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between