This year, I read 56 books – virtually the same number of books I read last year. 28 of the books were by women, 28 by men. This disposition is a vast improvement over years past and it wasn’t by accident. After tallying last year’s list I was shocked, not by how my reading tendencies skewed toward male authors, but by my failure to recognize the discrepancy. As the organizer of Vermin on the Mount, I strive to assemble readings that represent diversity in genre, gender and cultural background. Plus, in the summer of 2012 I read all of Jennifer Egan’s books while traveling in Portugal and Lithuania. If anything, I thought my reading was ahead of the gender curve. Nope. In 2012 the split was 39 to 12 I needed to do something about that.
By seeking out books by women, I started noticing the things that VIDA has been saying for years: books coverage is largely a boy’s club. Even more surprising to me was how obvious the discrepancy is on the shelves of book stores, where the male authors often outnumber female authors by a factor of two or three or four to one. When seeking out books by female writers, the consumer has fewer choices. That sucks. As a reader, writer, and book reviewer, I had to change. My reviews in The Floating Library, my books column for San Diego CityBeat, reflect this. For the sake of consistency, I have employed the same format I used for last year’s list, with a few minor twists.
Books I Recommend Without Reservation
The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell
Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
The Virgins by Pamela Erens
I have written extensively about The Disaster Artist, which might me the most entertaining book I read all year, and fans of Scott McClanahan were treated to two new books by the West Virginia author, but the book that surprised me the most was Revenge by Yoko Ogawa. In terms of the style and the strangeness of its storytelling, Ogawa’s linked stories remind me Paul Auster’s City of Glass trilogy: compulsively readable and deliciously strange. (Or at least the experience of reading it for the first time since I don’t feel the trilogy holds up that well). On NPR, Alan Cheuse calls Revenge macabre and metafictional. I’ll be reading more Ogawa in 2014.
Books That Made Me Question the Worthiness of the Human Project
Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Middle C by William Gass
Confessions from a Dark Wood by Eric Raymond
Books That Reaffirmed It
Fight Song by Joshua Mohr
Umnak: The People Remember: An Aleutian History by Tyler M. Schlung
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg
The Fire Outside My Window: a Survivor Tells the True Story of California's Epic Cedar Fire by Sandra Millers Younger
I didn’t review Sandra’s book because we are close friends. In fact, we both enrolled in Judy Reeves’s writing group around the same time in 2009. (In 2013, two members of that group, Marivi Soliven and Sandra Millers Younger, got their books published.) The Fire Outside My Window is a comprehensive, exhaustively researched account of the Cedar Fire, the largest wildfire in California history. It also burned down Sandra’s home. While Sandra was editing her manuscript, the group urged her to put more of her story in the book, but she felt like she had to make sure she got everyone else’s story right before she could expand on her own. She got the story right.
Books About the Oddness of Creative People
The Book of Dolores by William T. Vollmann
Happy Mutant Baby Pills by Jerry Stahl
Leaving Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
Writing by Marguerite Duras
Books That Zapped Me Into the Past
Tin God by Terese Svoboda
The Mango Bride by Marivi Soliven
Last of the Blue and Gray: Old Men, Stolen Glory, and the Mystery that Outlived the Civil War by Richard A. Serrano
Books That Anticipate the Future
Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel
Edie & the Low-Hung Hands by Brian Allen Carr
Books That Don’t Rhyme
Red Doc> by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
The Captain Lands in Paradise by Sarah Manguso
Field Work by Seamus Heaney
I wanted to read more poetry in 2013 and four books – one a quarter – doesn’t really cut it. I’ll do better in 2014.
Books That Make Me Wanna Commit Some Crimes
The Cost of Living by Rob Roberge
Donnybrook by Frank Bill
The Loom of Ruin by Sam McPheeters
The Loom of Ruin is a high concept novel with an exciting premise and one of the best openings I’ve read in a long time. Its protagonist is a ferociously violent Vietnamese gas station owner who rules his empire of Chevron stations with an iron fist. So why is he being watched by the LAPD, the FBI and Chevron’s corporate spies? The Loom of Ruin is a madcap apocalyptic L.A. story that’s somewhere between Repo Man and Falling Down. (Perhaps with good reason: McPheeters wrote the liner notes for the Criterion Collection’s re-issue of the post-punk classic.) The multitude of characters, inside jokes and lose ends make for a disappointing middle. But the climax of book, when the ruin stops looming and makes its mother-fucking presence felt, contains some of the most vivid, engrossing writing I’ve read all year.
Books Bursting with Strange Sex
Tampa by Alissa Nutting
What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life by Marie Calloway
Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger
Books That Were Stranger Than I Thought They’d Be
Strange Toys by Patricia Geary
In the House Upon the Dirt by the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell
Dra— by Stacey Levine
Madhouse Fog by Sean Carswell
Omensetter’s Luck by William Gass
Panorama City by Antoine Wilson
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
I don’t know why I didn’t write about Comyns’s extraordinary Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead for The Floating Library, but this book was delightfully bizarre. Its story concerns a sudden and savage flood that overtakes a small English village and the outbreak of strange deaths that follows. Comyns writes in a style both familiar and foreign, like Winnie the Pooh through the lens of Peter Greenaway. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was re-issued by Dorothy, a publishing project dedicated to books written by women.
Books with Ugly/Beautiful Pictures in Them
Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground by Matthew Chojnacki
Into the Light: The Healing Art of Kalman Aron by Susan Magee
I’m married to a visual artist with memberships to a half-dozen museums and art is a big part of our lives. We go to lots of art shows. We talk about art. Sometimes we even make it. My house is filled with art books. Why don’t I read them?
Books That Are Difficult to Classify
Hill William by Scott McClanahan
The Laughter of Strangers by Michael J. Seidlinger
One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses by Lucy Corin
Even Though I Don’t Miss You by Chelsea Martin
The Guardians by Sarah Manguso
Bough Down by Karen Green
Board by Brad Listi
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
I started reading Girl, Interrupted early in the year while house sitting in Los Feliz. I lost the book somehwere and couldn't finish it. So my reading of Girl, Interrupted was, wait for it, interrupted. I was disappointed because Kaysen's novel is fascinating. Published in 1993 it's best know for the film version that features Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Brittany Murphy and Jared Leto. But Kaysen was way ahead of her time with short modular chapters that are a hybrid of memoir and fiction -- though this doesn't quite do the book justice: prose projections? reification of the self? Anyway, when another house sitting client presented me with the book, I was stoked. Read it and you will be, too.
Books with Short Stories in Them
Creature by Amina Cain
Don’t Kiss Me: Stories by Lindsay Hunter
Any Deadly Thing by Roy Kesey
The Whack-Job Girls by Bonnie ZoBell
The Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders
The Fun Parts: Stories by Sam Lipsyte
The Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Eberhardt
The Book That Had the Biggest Impact
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Some books stay with me because of where I read them: I read Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable while high on hash outside of a library at Trinity College on a rare sunny day in Dublin; and I read a sizable chunk of Blood Meridian while riding shotgun in a pick-up truck on a cross-country trip. I’d look out the window at the desolation that is Texas and think, “Jesus.” I read much of 2666 in Merida, Yucatan, a place where the heat and the rain and the rot will turn anything built by the hand of man into a crumbling ruin in a few short seasons. This book scared the hell out of me. It’s a book built on a bedrock of boyish fantasies that turn into nightmares. Adolescent visions of ambition, sport, sex and war are exploded into horror shows of corruption and debauchery. It operates on the principle that there is no bottom to the depths of depravity that man will sink to if he does not meet with the censure of his peers. The symbol of this moral sinkhole is Santa Teresa, Bolaño’s thinly fictionalized Ciudad Juarez, where the rape, murder and disposal of young women went ignored for a grotesquely long period of time. The book, whose five parts are loosely organized around the search for an obscure German writer, makes it difficult to conjure up a conviction that the human project has any lasting value. How can we say that we are moving forward as a species when we systematically oppress so many simply because there isn’t a force large enough to stop us? 2666 tells us that we are constantly at war with ourselves, and the tragedy isn’t that it’s happening but that we don’t realize it.
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