They say the good is the enemy of the great; given that it’s now
March and I haven’t done my last year-in-books retrospective, I’d say the okay
is the enemy of the done! As usual I had a lot of trouble narrowing down to
10—it seems the best I can do is to get down to 10 reading “regions.” So here’s
a map of my 2014 reading:
1 I started the year with my sister’s big red anthology
of Romantic writers (mostly
canonical poets). It took six months to work through, but I renewed my
appreciation of many old acquaintances and met many new friends to admire (note: that’s a horrible sentence I just
wrote). Among those that stood out were Wordsworth (who I read just after and
curiously preferred to my old favorite Blake), Byron’s Don Juan, and Hazlitt’s
essays (especially the first piece of sports reporting ever, “The Fancy”).
2.
Philip K Dick: The other big
book I started at the beginning of the year was The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick put together by Jonathan Lethem and
….,. Hardly light reading, I spent a lot of time flipping from PKD’s journal
entries to the notes on the various gnostic mystics and philosophers he evokes.
The insight into his thinking change the way I read Androids (which I taught for the last time for the foreseeable
future) and sent me to reread The Man in
the High Castle and read a pair of his later novels: A
Scanner Darkly and The Transmigration
of Timothy Archer. Dick himself proposes a reading list of his own works
that I plan on gradually getting to.
Reading PKD also led me to slight detour through some dystopias (The Slynx, The Circle, 1984, Brave New
World, V for Vendetta and Divergent),
to LeGuin’s PKD homage Lathe of Heaven,
and to the cyberpunk classic Altered
Carbon (heavy PKD influence).
3.
China Mievielle’s The City and the City also bears a
PKD influence. It stands out enough to get its own entry though. I don’t know
why I don’t read more Mievielle.
4.
Wolf in White Van also gets its own
spot, though I can’t really think of what else I’d relate it to. Darnielle’s
writing style leaves a little to be desired, but his tone is Judas Priest’s
“United” from the other side of the worm hole.
5.
Not a big year for graphic
narrative, but Derf’s My Friend
Dahmer stood out, as did volume 2 of Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye, Little Hits.
6.
Jack Kerouac. Hiking in the
Cascades reminded me that you can’t fall off a mountain, so I reread Dharma Bums The classic beat novel
retains some charm, though the casual sexism is unsettling. Yu could say the
same thing about On the Road, which I
also reread. I toyed with the idea of systematically reading the Kerouac canon
this year, which I might yet do.
7.
Lots of horror this
October as usual (thought I did coin the hashtag #spookytimesallthetime). There’s a John Updike novel about small town
upstate New York inside of Peter Straub’s smart mass market Ghost Story. There’s an alien worm race
inside of everything in Laird Barron’s The
Croning. I realized reading it that the unity I missed stitching together
the stories of Barron’s semi-related stories is in fact there—only it’s emerging
as part of a much larger, longer game. I also read widely in various Ellen Daltow
anthologies—one new discovery being John Langan. There’s also one about a guy
who goes to a movie that I haven’t tracked down that I’d like to read again.
8.
I typically want more from fantasy
than I get. But I enjoyed the secondary world heist stories in The Lies of Locke Lamorra and its
sequels and Kij Johnson’s novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” about a
bridge builder, ferryboat captain, and cultural change.
9.
But the best fantasy novel I read last year was Watership Down.
It has all of the traditional attributes of a fantasy novel: seers and
warriors, a quest, a completely realized language and folklore. It’s a deeply
weird book in its ordinariness.
10.
I resumed my tour through the Richard Stark Parker books after
learning I could request purchases from my library online. As a
representative I’d chooseThe Rare Coin Score: the great title,
the memorably swishy foil, the introduction of Claire. But my favorite moment
is a car driving by with it’s windows rolled down, rock music spilling out. The
world is changing out there around them, but Parker is still planning the
perfect heist.
Last to go: Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
Last to go: Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
