The Year in Reading

Taking a leap from the Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, presented to me and you by 20SB, I give you my year in reading, approximately.  I say approximately because there’re a few here I can’t remember if I read in 2009 or the close of 2008.

• The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.  The only non-fiction I read, discounting a little of Ernest Hemingway on Writing and Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.  Egan does a wonderful job of bringing the Dust Bowl to life, and it is a world apart, let me tell you.  You can’t even imagine.  Comes with pictures that, if you’ve got any tie at all to the land, will chill you to the bone.
• Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen.  Pick two of the three novels this was formed from, and read those.  Damn good writing, but not worth retelling a story three times.
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.  Another book I’d choose parts to read and parts to leave behind.
• Twilight by William Gay.  You thought I meant something else, didn’t you?  His most disappointing work.
• A Mercy by Toni Morrison.  I don’t know why you’d call this a novel.  It’s a novella, tops.  Good, for how short it is.  Needed more meat to it, I thought.
• Secret Son by Laila Lalami.  Dickensian, in that Great Expectations sort of way, plus Morocco.
• Slouching Toward Nirvana by Charles Bukowski.  The first poetry I read this year.  A letdown from the superb Last Night of the Earth collection.
• News of the World by Philip Levine.  Really good, really heavy, dirty, depressing poetry.
• The Speed Limit of Clouds by Jon Veinberg.  Go read it, now.
• The Bell Jar by you oughta know who.  Didn’t like it.  Don’t get why others like it.
• Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.  It’s not American Psycho, but it is as plotless.  Good for his first novel– Ellis’ prose was masterful right from the start.
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck.  Timshel.
• The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.  The only good noir I read this year.  Never read Mickey Spillane.  Just don’t do it.
• Double Indemnity by James M. Cain.  Not too bad?  Not very good.
• Reread Blood Meridian, Suttree, No Country, Islands in the Stream, Provinces of Night.

Though a reread, Islands in the Stream was my favorite for the year, I think.  It kept me company through some hard times this summer, and for a while turned my inner monologue Hemingway-flavored.  I doubt I’ll be able to pick it up again without thinking of the pool and the lounge chairs and the sound of the palms overhead.  It’s really a wonderful book.  The beginning is Hemingway at his best–simple, evocative, powerful.  Thomas Hudson is a painter living on the Isle of Bimini, and the novel opens just before his three sons come to visit.  The book involves drink, sport, and war–Papa’s holy trinity.  People don’t read his posthumous works enough.  I suggest you do.