I really want to read 1o0 books in 2010 for some reason. Right now I’m only on my 83rd book. Can I read 17 more books in 14 days? We’ll see. I certainly don’t want to sacrifice quality for quantity. I did manage to read a few books in the past week that were worth mentioning.

• The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball): Ever dream of quitting your job and moving to a farm? This book will make you rethink that dream. Kimball meets a farmer, falls in love, quits her job, and moves to the farm. Farm work is hard! Kimball finds farm work rewarding but doesn’t sugar coat the sweat, blood, and tears part of it.
• Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson: The fourth installment (due in March 2011) in Atkinson’s series featuring private eye Jackson Brodie. Again, this one relies on odd coincidences, but Atkinson always makes it work. Plus there’s a cute dog. The various story lines are Tilly, an aging actress; Tracy Waterhouse, a retired policewoman who makes a split second decision that changes her life forever; and Jackson Brodie, returning to the are where he grew up in search of someone else’s roots.
• Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick: Ozick has taken the plot from Henry James’  The Ambassadors and retold it as a “photographic negative”. The problem for me is that I’ve never read James’ book, something I hope to remedy soon. No matter, as I enjoyed this book thoroughly in soite of that. Bea Nightingale is a middle-aged, divorced school teacher in the Bronx who has lived alone for decades. Her estranged brother Marvin asks her out of the blue to go to Paris to retrieve her nephew Julian, whom Marvin believes in in the city’s thrall. In fact, the nephew she doesn’t know is in thrall to Holocaust victim Lili. Add to the mix Julian’s feckless elder sister Iris, who also flees to Paris in search of Julian, so she says. With simple, direct sentences, Ozick manages to convey the despair and emotional turbulence of her characters. I’m onto James’ original next!

Connie Willis’s Blackout returns to the time travel that she explored in the Domesday Book, and brings back some of the same characters as well. Historians reasearching WWII travel from 2060 to 1940s Britain, but then have trouble getting back to the future. There’s no Marty McFly, though– instead, you’ll find  lots of detail about everyday life in London during the Blitz and a huge cliff-hanger, but I really liked it. I’m glad that the follow-up All Clear is already out.

I’ll join other HBS booksellers in recommending another historical/speculative mix, A Matter of Magic by Patricia Wrede, previously published as two novels but now available in a single volume. It’s set in England during the Regency period, and features a homeless girl named Kim, who’s hired to break into the wagon of Mairelon the Magician. Instead, the magician catches her, but then takes her on as an apprentice instead of turning her in. Adventures ensue.

With the holidays upon us, I’ve been negligent in posting the past two weeks even though I’ve managed to read some good books!

I read Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded on the way to Virginia for Thanksgiving. It’s brilliant. I know this book has been getting the sort of hype that makes you wonder if it’s really good or if they really just have a good marketing machine. I wrote a whole post about memoirs and how often they fail for me, but Jay-Z’s is no usual memoir. I’d call it more of a reflection on his life and how he got where he is mentally. Full of lots of color photos, it also has annotated lyrics to a selection of his songs. I think he’s a genius.

Another biography I finished recently which you should go and read right now is Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life. Schiff  upends some of the major myths about Cleopatra. In a male-dominated society then and now, Cleopatra has never been given fair treatment. Schiff explains that Cleopatra was no beauty, even by Classical standards. She was, however, an amazing conversationalist, trained from birth in literature, art, rhetoric, and philosophy each day of the week. She was also the first pharaoh to actually speak Egyptian–the Ptolemys were Greek, not Egyptian. Schiff mines all sorts of details from her research giving the reader a well rounded portrait of Cleopatra and the time period. Given the sheer number of books on Cleopatra, why would you want to read another? This one brings history to life again and has the benefit of not being dumbed down.

No one does inner lives quite like Paul Auster. In Sunset Park, Miles
has dropped out of college and makes a living cleaning out foreclosed
houses in southern Florida. He falls in love with a 17-year-old high school
student, whose older sister then tries to blackmail him into stealing
from the foreclosures, so he flees to a squat in Brooklyn. The plot,
while well-paced and interesting, isn’t even the best part of the
book.  well, the plot’s strong, but that’s not the point. It’s the
minds of the characters that makes this book a great read. Different
chapters detail the inner lives of Miles, his father, and his
fellow-squatters, as they try to escape emotional and financial
disaster.

The tail end of the book isn’t as satisfying as the middle, and the
last two pages just left me confused. That might be just me– I’m
looking forward to hearing the opinions of other readers on this one.

A provocative title for this post I realize, but I often wonder why all the memoirs that published get written in the first place. I have to assume that the author thinks they have something to share with the world, some sort of unique perspective. More often than not, they follow this pattern:

• I grew up in:
  • a really poor family in a rough neighborhood.
  • a cult.
  • a hippie commune with free spirits.
  • evangelical family that punished me a lot.
• I overcame my background and became:
  • a writer.
  • a lawyer.
  • better than them.
  • a drug addict.
• Today I’ve:
  • got a normal family.
  • adopted some kids from other countries.
  • got dreadlocks and tattoos and live an alternative lifestyle.
  • got a writing degree and published some stuff.

Often the writing is okay, not great, just okay. You can see where I’m going with this. It’s all part of the “too many books are being published” argument. You might think I’m here to whine about a particular book. No sir! I’m actually writing this post because I read a book on the plane to Atlanta last Thursday that completely goes against everything I said here. Unfortunately for you, Dear Reader, it’s not due until Spring 2011, but I’m saying it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. The book: Andre Dubus III’s Townie: A Memoir.
After Dubus’s parents divorced in the 1970s, his mother moved he and his siblings to a depressed Massachusetts mill town outside of Boston, rife with violence and crime. Facing daily beatings, Dubus eventually begins weight lifting and decades of fighting back. His memoir examines the correlation between violence and creativity as well as his relationship with his remote father. It’s simply stunning. His honesty and willingness to look with open eyes at himself and his family won me over. A lot of its brilliance lies in his remembering and sharing of the details and I honestly feel like I know him now.
Wonderful, tremendous,  these are words I normally use to describe books I like. They don’t seem accurate in this case nor do any other words I can think of while writing this. It’s simply a book you must read.

I’ve been wrestling for a while with this post. I had about two paragraphs written but realized they were nothing but plot recaps and scrapped the whole thing.  A gentleman who reads this blog visited the store yesterday. His only question was what did I think of Freedom? After all, I did finish it a while ago.

Like Franzen himself, Freedom is polarizing. Great American novelist or overrated hack? Great American novel, or seriously grating
characterization?

I’m usually a cynic about that kind of praise, but I think Franzen
isn’t overrated, or at least not by much. Freedom is truly great.
Saying I loved it doesn’t really express how I felt about it, though.
It’s a little more complicated than that.

I certainly didn’t love all of the characters–Walter with his grating niceness, self absorbed Patty, their son Joey who I mainly wanted to punch, and the whiny daughter who isn’t as important to the story for some reason. Yet grew affectionate about them and was happy in the end with the lives Franzen created for them. With Franzen you always spend a lot of time frustrated with his characters, but it pays off.

Freedom is a great book. I’m betting that it will become a classic, at least I hope it does. Ignore all the stuff being said about the author. Just read the book for what it is, a novel about the absurdities of modern American life. Hopefully you like it as much as I did.

If you only read one book on attempting to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence this year, make it this one! I found myself reading bits of it aloud to Mr. Bookdwarf. Dyer’s play with language and genre subvert the standard literary criticism tomes. How he even got this book in print is beyond me. The phrase “herding cats” comes to mind when I think about Dyer’s writing process.

But it’s so much fun to read! In this wonderful book, I discovered some of my favorite sentences: “To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.” Mind you, he’s talking about not being interested in theater. If you’re interested in literature — that is, feel anxiety about its health, its trends, its quality — then Dyer’s work should reassure you that it’s alive and well.

[Ed. note: I just realized that I didn’t hit publish on this post last week! So the weekend I’m referencing is in fact not this past one, but the one previous. This weekend I was in fact melting down in Georgia and Alabama.]

With such hot weather making anything but reading a sweat-inducing chore, I manged to get to a few books in the past days.

Last week, I started Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw. Love him or hate him, the man’s got an opinion on just about everything, something I respect. Medium Raw collects his musings on everything from fatherhood to controversial folks in the food industry. You’ve got to like a guy who gets so passionate about everything. It delivered exactly what I wanted, musings on food with occasional rants.

Another book I’ve been hearing booksellers rave about is Lily King’s Father of the Rain. They were right to rave! It’s an amazing exploration of the relationship between a daughter and her alcoholic father. Set in an upper middle class (read WASP) town outside of Boston, eleven-year-old Daley Amory watches her parents’ marriage falling apart. King really gets what it’s like to realize that your parents aren’t perfect and that they’re own troubles get in the way of being a parent. Even the mother has her own issues. It’s heart wrenching without being saccharine.

I love John Banville and I love Benjamin Black. They’re so different but so much the same. How interesting that they’re the same person! I read Elegy for April, Banville’s third crime novel set in 1950s Dublin in one clip. Quirke is fresh out of rehab and trying to forge a relationship with his daughter Phoebe. When she comes to him worried about a friend gone missing–the April of the title–he takes it upon himself to investigate. As the story unfolds, secrets come unburied and relationships change, as they do in Black’s series. Particularly appealing are the descriptions of Quirke learning to drive.

And finally I finished reading The Three Weissmans of Westport by Cathleen Schine. It’s been sitting on my shelf, with only 10 pages read, for months. I’ll admit when I first read the description, I thought “not my cup of tea”, but I was pleasantly surprised. Ignore all of the modern day Jewish Jane Austen stuff and just read it for what it is, a novel about a mother and her daughters going through a rough patch. Their decision to move in together is not one I would choose, but it’s a clever way to make the story more interesting. Schine excels with the descriptions of the various characters’ inner lives.

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell: How does one approach the fifth book of a favorite writer? Each book brings the fear that it won’t be as good as the last. Never fear with Thousand Autumns. While it might seem slow to start, Mitchell spends time creating layer upon layer of detail. It’s a very mature novel, one that I appreciated fully only at the end.
• The Reversal by Michael Connelly: A new chapter in Conelly’s Lincoln Lawyer series finds defense attorney Mickey Haller recruited to be prosecutor in a high-profile case of a child murderer, who’s just been released after 24 years in jail.  There’s never any doubt that he did the murder, but Connelly excels at building courtroom drama suspense as well as the tension in investigating a old case. Harry Bosch is back as well, leading the investigation.
• The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker: This book is mesmerizing. I can already imagine the film version with lots of empty landscapes and lone sheep grazing. The novel begins thirty years after Helmer has to return to the family sheep farm after the death of his twin brother Henk. He moves his elderly father upstairs and begins remodeling the house in a minimalist style. Then Riet, his brother’s fiance, shows up and asks that he let her son come live on the farm. Oh, his name is Henk, but he’s not Helmer’s nephew. Henk’s arrival throws things off course. There’s a surprise in the fourth part that I won’t ruin here. It’s a quietly humorous and tender novel.