STL #127: The Year in Reading 2021

Once again, I try to cram subjective experience into the arbitrary constraints of a top 10 list. In this case, not even my sneaky pairings let me get down to 10, so this one goes to 11. There's a break between 3 and 4, but otherwise they could go in any order.  

1. Ted Chiang: The Story of Your Life and Others. I also read his Exhalation, which was very good. This volume, though, is extraordinary. Every story is a "hit," which in this particular case I mean that I can imagine a future in which any given story transformed the history of science fiction for ever. I wrote a monologue for my book club about how my past favorite sf novels have fallen by the wayside (after rereading). I've never really thought about it, but this is probably my favorite sf short story collection ever. 
   
2. Ben Lerner: Leaving Atocha Station. The scene where our protagonist lurks after a stranger in the museum, alternately jealous and indignant over his open outpouring of emotion in front of beauty. That's the reaction to art he seeks but cannot attain. I relate.  
3. George Saunders:  A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Nothing could be better than this: a master craftsman rejoicing in the craft of Russian masters. He breaks down each story in a mechanical but exceeding sensitive manner. A Bizarro version of this might be Best Remembered Poems edited by Martin Gardner, who is a puzzle master sharing trivia about the most widely recalled (not best) poems in English. 
   
   
4. Ron Silliman: Ketjak. I read this with a pencil in hand, tracking the Fibonacci sequence from section to section. I found the part where he fucked up.  
5. Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Mine too. 
6. Paul Beatty: The Sell Out. This wasn't written for me, and reading it sometimes made me feel like I was overhearing something I shouldn't. Ace satire. 
7. William Trevor: A Bit on the Side, Death in Summer, and Love & Summer.  I think of Trevor as the last midcentury author (of the last century), who happened to survive and keep writing into the next century. 
8. Megan Abbot: The Turn Out. Abbot has become one of the handful of current authors I read everything by, as it comes it. Each novel takes on some dark corner of the feminine universe. This is one of the darkest corners, and one of her best.
9. David Shields: How Literature Saved My Life. I also read Reality Hunger, I Think You're Totally Wrong, and Nobody Hates Trump More than Trump. In this one he explains what exactly it is he's after, and provides a cool reading list.
10. Dorothy Baker: Cassandra at the Wedding. The California of Didion, just before Didion. 
11. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I would pair this with David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for a particularly lengthy double feature. Both are fantastic (in both senses) and formally audacious. I give Clarke the edge because her formalism, manifesting in mock scholarly footnotes, is more of a joy to read. 

Honorable Mention: Shadows of the Short Days, Flamethrowers, My Struggle, Exit West

The theme of my 2021 reading was books published this century. I was frustrated and let down by a lot of what I read, but in the end all of the books above fit that profile except for two: Silliman and Baker. Even those might come with asterisks: Ketjak is a 70s artifact but was republished as part of the completed Age of Huts and I never would have found the lost classic Cassandra without the good offices of NYRB Books. But if you look more closely, Saunders and Gardner add recent commentary to much older works, Chiang's Story collects works mostly from the 90s, and several of the others were published in the early aughts and therefore begun in the previous century. 

Reading Roundup: April 2022

 Note: I ended the last STL with a promise to followup in a week. That was almost a year ago, but I'll give it a try. My goal is to write something every day in May, so I figure why not dredge up memories of things I read a year ago.

Speaking of memorious dredgery, here's what I read in the month just ended:

77 Dream Songs by John Berryman. I loved this both for the skeptical approach to the self and occasional stunning bit of pure poetry. I'm struggling to express what I mean by his approach, but he struggles in his masks, including the very awkward blackface which nonetheless can produce a beautiful line like [the] "Honey dusk do sprawl" or  wearing another, transparent, mask "The weather fleured" (hilariously progressing from "The weather was fine" and "The weather was very fine.") or "O Adlai mine" (disclosing his vote) or the comic and awkward "What wonders is/ she sitting on, over there?" 

Invinicible: Head of the Class by Robert Kirkman, volume 4. I think of this as being meringue-like comic book perfection, but while it is perfection, a lot of heavy shit goes on. 

Reckless: Destroy All Monsters by Brubraker and Phillips. Scribbles in the margins of noir. 

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by John Berryman. Being a continuation of Dream Songs. Some flashes of the earlier brilliance, but would be stronger if the number of poems was cut by half. At least. At some point in the not too distant future someone will be the last to read Berryman, given his blackface and tendency to mention suicide toward the end of every poem. That'll be a shame.

The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beach by Stephen Dobyns. I like one of his novels. These are his poems, which are competent. The best line is the title. 

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.  It may be the quintessential science fiction novel for two reasons 1) the science reflects and is reflected by the plot and theme (and characterization and structure). 2)It imagines a coherent future (a few of them, actually) while reflecting the present (several of those two, actually). I first read this as a a teenagers, when I did not know much about anti war movement, zero population growth, Future Shock, sexual revolution, about hippies and back to the land, about the best and the brightest, about gay liberation or really even the ERA. Heck, I did not even know what cultural relativism was.

The Dolphin by Robert Lowell.  Berryman was no gem, but at least he was aware of it. It seemst to me that these are garbage poems by a garbage human. Inspired me to put Elizabeth Hardwick's essays on reserve.

Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman and Sam Kieth. Oh, the Robert Smithiness of it all! Did not age well, though the appeal of the Death story makes sense. 

Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest. All of the structural intricacy of softcore porn with none of the surface pleasures.

Astro City: Metrobook by Busiek and Anderson. A repackaging of the first three collections all of which I've read before. The expanded format allows restores the original publication order--previously, the Confessor story was pulled out from the middle of the second series to be published on its own, while all the short stories were grouped together. This is at least my third reading of this material and I still love Astro City. The short stories are among the best in the genre. 

Breezeway by John Ashbery. Did I mention it was National Poetry Month? I'd like to say you never need an excuse to read Ashbery, but apparently I do. This is late Ashbery, published as he turned 88, but late Ashbery is a very good Ashbery indeed.

Lighthead by Terrance Hayes. Hayes is a terrifically inventive formalist best known for his book of "American sonnets." Here he invents the "golden shovel" which uses the words of another poem ("We Real Cool" in the first case) as the end words for each line of a new poem. He also adapts a PowerPoint style from Japanese business, called pecha kucha, which calls for 20 seconds of speech for each of 20 slides.

I Remember by Joe Brainard. I think this is a reread, but none of it came back to me. (I was reading several American Long Poems a week when I was working on my dissertation.) No reflection on the book which I entirely enjoyed, though in fact I've already forgotten most of what I read, again. 

A Poet's Work by Sam Hamill. Essays from the eighties that I read in the early 90s. He writes very clearly about what he values so greatly in poetry. "I could say that poetry saved my life, but who would believe me?" 

Measured by Stone by Sam Hamill. Poems from later in his life. He's still clear headed, this time about the fact that his poetry won't last past his lifetime. But I read it last week, so...

Totals: 15 books. 5 comics. 1 book of essays. 8 books of poetry. 6 rereads(!). 1 memoir.