There remains in my memory no other book which I have found so incredible, yet so difficult to read that I would not go through the experience again if possible. Lessing's The Golden Notebook is the first to fit into this ambiguous category: is it a good thing, a bad thing, or perhaps indicative of its remarkable nature? I don't really know.
The Golden Notebook was probably one of the most feminist texts I've ever read. Yet as Doris Lessing writes herself in the reader's guide that came with my book, she never intended it as a feminist text. It just was. Lessing's ability to portray human relationships, male-female sexual interactions in all their different shapes and messed up forms was mindblowing. She isn't one of those overwrought emotional writers which waste endless words, ink, paper on a simple interaction - her succinctness is probably one of the best I've seen. Yet at the same time due to the sheer mass of all her words, the density of content, made her extremely tiring to read. It was like eating a too rich cake. No wonder I could only plod slowly through.
Finally there is the aspect of mental illness: a theme I had not noticed as I read the book. Simply put, I had not noticed that it was there at all, because I legitimately thought that people did behave like that (and that it was acceptable). That idea, strikes me mostly more than anything else in the novel.
I guess I've found a book to add to the 2011 list.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Top Ten Reads for 2010
Extremely long overdue, and not even fully complete because I no longer possess some of these books at hand and can no longer recall what drew me to each book: I present the Top Ten Book List of 2010 (in no particular order). There's a 11A and 11B this time (thus 13 books on the list), because each book alone was not quite enough to make me want it to be on the list, and I had quite forgotten I had read the remarkable A Clockwork Orange last year until I had fully typed out the details of 11A and 11B. My memory's not quite what it used to be, it seems.
Cheers.
----
1. After Dark - Haruki Murakami
Eyes mark the shape of the city.
Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature-or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flickr and flair up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.
This was the first Haruki Murakami book I read, and it's setting left a deep impression on me. As seen in previous years (2009/2008), I have a soft spot for the underbellies of Asian cities, particularly Japanese ones. No one does noir-ish stuff as good as Japanese writers, somehow. I would and could launch into a pseudo-cultural commentary here about the reasons why Japan is so potent with this sort of stuff, but I shall refrain.
After Dark essentially follows a young woman around Japan (literally) after dark, when the last metro trains for the suburbs leave central Tokyo. She meets a whole host of characters of the nocturnal sort, cafe waitresses, musicians and even love hotel workers/working girls as she struggles to come to terms with her own feelings about her supernaturally comatose sister. I was left feeling with a strange sense of unease at the end, and didn't really like the supernatural bits about the sister. Still it was an overall transfixing narrative.
2. Wild Swans - Jung Chang
At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China. The year was 1924 and China was in chaos. Much of it, including Manchuria, where my grandmother lived, was ruled by warlords. The liaison was arranged by her father, a police officer in the provincial town of Yixian in southwest Manchuria, about a hundred miles north of the Great Wall and 250 miles northeast of Peking.
2010 also marks the introduction of non-fiction books into the list, the next being Jon Ronson's Them. I remember lugging the super thick and battered copy of Wild Swans all the way to work, in hopes of a slow day as M/s A when I worked for them last year so I could read instead. A wonderfully told story of three generations of her family, following the ups and downs of the past few decades of Chinese history, this is a must to gain a first-person understanding of China during the Maoist era. The sheer scale and length of the narrative alone makes it a true, modern day epic.
I just don't trust her take on Mao from a historical point of view.
3. Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Do not set foot in my office. That's Dad's rule. But the phone'd rung twenty-five times. Normal people give up after ten or eleven, unless it's a matter of life or death. Don't they? Dad's got an answering machine like James Garner's in The Rockford Files with big reels of tape. But he's stopped leaving it switched on recently. Thirty rings the phone got to. Julia couldn't hear it up in her converted attic 'cause "Don't You Want Me?" by the Human League was thumping out dead loud. Forty rings. Mum couldn't hear 'cause the washing machine was on berserk cycle and she was hoovering the living room. Fifty rings. That was just not normal. S'pose Dad had been mangled by a juggernaut on the M5 and the police only had this phone number 'cause all his other ID's got charred? We could lose out our final chance to see our charred father in the terminal ward.
I loved Black Swan Green. I love David Mitchell. There is just something to his writing that sweeps me away, the way he writes is so clear and concise, yet the words still maintain a musicality. Little bits of the book jumped out at me, like being amused about that his father works for Greenland, a grocery store in the UK (hahaha, Iceland anyone?). Then there was the story about how Black Swan Green got it's name: the locals thought it'd be ironic. But there were the wonderfully crafted scenes of the slow breakdown of relations between his parents. The fight about the rockery was so perfectly crafted, conveying the strain between his parents, about how people fight seemingly little battles as a front to larger ones. The fight about the rockery was essentially one of a power struggle between his parents, with an extremely comedically tragic ending as the expensive koi gets eaten by a heron. Then of course there's the father's affair. Black Swan Green is not just a novel about Jason, the young protagonist, but about his parents and their struggle to find meaning in their middle ages.
4. Such a Long Journey - Rohinton Mistry
The first light in the morning barely illuminated the sky as Gustard Noble faced eastwards to offer his orisons to Ahura Mazda. The hour was approaching six, and up in the compound's solitary tree the sparrows began to call. Gustard listened to their chirping every morning while reciting his kusti prayers. There was something reassuring about it. Always, the sparrows were first; the cawing of crows came later.
Rohinton Mistry, is another master storyteller. Marrying a straightforward prose style, it made all the disturbing icky bits all the more clear an image in one's mind. Especially when it came to Tehmul and the doll, I remember having to put down the book and walk away for a while because I couldn't take the imagery. I replicate bits of it here for your pleasure:-
"Dilnavaz began undressing the doll… the pearl necklace, shoes, stockings, came off one by one, as Tehmul watched, fascinated. When she started to unbutton the dress, he became quite restless.
'OK Tehmul, pay attention,' said Gustard. 'You know what to do with this?' But Tehmul was engrossed in the undressing of the doll. Dilnavaz was down to the underclothing when a trickle of saliva started to descend from one corner of his mouth.
…On the way out he hesitated. The doll was stripped down to it's anatomically vague pink plaster. 'Ohhhh.' His nostrils flared; his mouth began to move in a manner of a ruminant's; a hand reached out."
Then there was the bit about Tehmul and him begging the prostitutes:-
"Pleasepleaseonceonly. Onceonlyonce. Fastfastrubbingpleaseonceonly. Pleasetakemoneypleaseplease. Letmetouchletmepressonceonly."
I died reading that. Rohinton Mistry wrote it so well. It's like watching a train wreck, but in prose form.
There were also a lot of memorable, strand out scenes in the book which struck me. There was the bit about the chicken, where Gustard fails at an attempt to relieve his childhood by killing a chicken because his children start to see it as a pet. Then there's his fight with his oldest son, Sohrab. Then his best friend Dinshawji's behaviour and his subsequent death. Dilvanaz's attempts to right her family problems through magic limes given to her by the neighbour, Miss Kutpitia. So many different intersecting strands of narrative, all sewn up together so well.
5. Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
A classic well deserving of it's status in literature, The Great Gatsby married both a wonderfully written narrative with a simple story. Same can't be said for Tender is the Night, which I read in Dec 2010 and absolutely hated.
6. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the back of the cab as it lurches forward in traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Peirce & Peirce and twenty six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
One of the most disturbing pieces of literature I have ever read in my life, American Psycho nonetheless stands out for it's sheer ability to get to the heart of the darkest human psyches, and darkly compared the to the modern capitalist world. Bret Easton Ellis manages to craft Patrick Bateman, the literal American Psycho, into a character one can sympathise (but not empathise!) with. His brutal murders of prostitutes (HORRIFYING) are contrasted with insights into a deeply fractured mind. Easton Ellis' characterisations of Bateman's panic attacks are altogether so perfect and on the dot, and the way Bateman uses music as a numbing tool to block out his mind when he's using a chainsaw to saw someone to death, is sheer literary genius. Definitely one of the most memorable books on this list.
7. The Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri
After her mother's death, Ruma's father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he'd never seen. In the past year he had visited France, Holland, and most recently Italy. There were package tours, traveling in the countryside, each meal and museum and hotel prearranged. He was gone for two, three, sometimes four weeks at a time. When he was away Ruma did not hear from him. Each time, she kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news, to make sure there hadn't been a plane crash anywhere in the world
Jhumpa Lahiri's words and chosen language are unremarkable in their accessibility and mundanity, but these only serve as a backdrop, a reflector even, in the stories she tells. How her words reach deep inside into your emotions, caress them and make you empathise as much as you were the characters themselves. She is a magical weaver of worlds, with the material of the common man. Definitely one of the only writers of short stories that I trust.
8. A Short History of Tractors in Ukaranian - Marina Lewycka
Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed up memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.
I give this book, and highly recommend it, to all my close friends. This was also, coincidentally the first book I read of the year, and I read it on Pulau Sibu when I was on a holiday with my parents over the 2009/2010 new year. It was not even my book: the sea wind battered copy was borrowed from the little hotel's roving bookshelf. It apparently first belonged to the owner, who then left it there for the pleasure of the guests. My dad first stumbled upon it when he gave up reading Nicholas Spark's The Notebook, and he recommended it to me after I had tore through Ha Jin's War Trash (see 2009's list).
It was absolutely hilarious and heartwarming, all rolled into a ball. I was introduced to a world of Toshiba Apples, Botticellian Breasts and Lada cars, complete with an actual history of tractors. I literally rolled over with laughter at multiple parts. Somehow, Lewycka's first novel proved to be the best written of all her present novels.
9. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
'What's it gonna be then, eh?'
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what theses mestos were like, things changing so skorry theses days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog and All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I'm starting off the story with.
This was another book that was hard to read, for it's extremely violent content. Of course compared to American Psycho, reading this while on my trip to Amsterdam was comparatively much easier. Nonetheless the senseless acts of violence was quite jarring, and I especially felt horrid when I read about them attacking the old man. At least Patrick Bateman attacked bums and prostitutes quickly, much unlike this lot which enjoyed violence for violence's sake. Still, Burgess managed to create in Alex a likeable enough character - you see his love for music, the power struggle within his group, his attempts at redemption. What really struck me the most through was the role of the Priest/Pastor (I forget which now) in the book: he maintains that by the authorities forcibly removing Alex's ability to commit violence, they are taking away his humanity, his ability to make decisions no matter how reprehensible.
Throught provoking.
10. Them: Adventures with Extremists - Jon Ronson
It was a balmy Saturday afternoon in Trafalgar Square in summertime, and Omar Bakri Mohammed was declaring Holy War on Britain. He stood on a podium at the front of Nelson's Column and announced that he would not rest until he saw the Black Flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. There was much cheering. The space had been rented out to him by Westminister Council.
And thus so begins Them, with one of the most awesome beginning paragraphs I have read in my 21 odd years. Ronson managed to put a hilarious spin to what could've arguably been a very dry topic. Instead the way he documents his encounters with the extremists, like Omar Bakri giving out flyers at Holborn station, another's insistence that the world is secretly run by alien lizards, plus interviews with the modern KKK, is hilarious. Then there are the sobering bits, of governments gone simply mad and eliminating viewed extremists with no prejudice. What emerges is a rollicking ball of amusement. Next to Tractors, this is one of the other books I have made a point to give to friends as a gift, because it is simply worth reading. Such a hidden gem, considering I bought it for £2 for my favourite bookshop in Oxford.
11A. We Are All Made of Glue - Marina Lewycka
The first time I met Wonder Boy, he pissed on me. I suppose he was trying to warn me off, which was quite prescient when you consider how things turned out.
One afternoon in late October, somewhere between Stoke Newington and Highbury, I'd ventured into an unfamiliar street, and come across and entrance of a cobbled lane that led in between two high garden walls. After about fifty metres the lane opened out into a grassy circle and I found myself standing in front of a big double-fronted house, half derelict and smothered in ivy, so completely tucked away behind the gardens of the neighbouring houses that you'd never have guessed it was there, crouched behind a straggly privet hedge and a thicket of self-seeded ash and maple saplings. I assumed it was uninhabited - who could live in a place like this? Something was carved on the gatepost. I pulled the ivy aside and read: Canaan house. Canaan - even the name exuded a musty whiff of holiness.
Dealing with the protagonist, Georgie, undergoing a new separation from her husband. As she fights her own heartbreak and geriatrics for the discounted Sainsbury food, she runs into a host of new characters in her life - most significantly her elderly neighbour Naomi. Some bits made me cry, some bits made me laugh like mad. Some bits struck me with their meaning. But yet somehow, the ending made me feel a little dissatisfied. Hence We Are All Made of Glue barely made the list, and pales far in comparison to Tractors.
11B. The Way Things Look to Me - Roopa Farooki
Asif Declan Kalil Murphy has a brooding resentment of his name, and by extension, of his deceased parents, although he resents them for many more things than his name, up to and including their untimely departure from life. The trouble with his name he thinks, is that it promises so much more - it promises that he will be interesting and exotic, larger than life, Irish charm and whimsy blended with South Asian mysticism and romance. Asif finds it impossible to live up to his shining name, and so shudders moth-like just behind it; avoiding introductions and hiding behind initials.
I was drawn to this book because one of the characters in the story is a high functioning autistic. I smiled at the bits of her I recognised in my brother. Rather, this book was about the impact of the autistic child on the family's relations, one of the more honest bits of writing about autism I've seen to be honest. In the bitter sister, I recognised bits of myself growing up. In the brother, I recognised the role I'd soon have to undertake as sole caregiver. The characters were likeable enough, yet somehow as a whole it rang slightly hollow at the end.
Disappointments
1. Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami): spent most of the end bits of the book going WTF?!
2. Tender is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald): felt that Fitzgerald was being overly self-indulgent, too needlessly wordy
3. Two Caravans (Marina Lewycka): narrative too scattered and messy
4. Possession (A. S. Byatt): extreme and gratuitous literary wanking, stopped reading 1/3 through lest I act on my impulse to immolate the book and it's annoying characters
-----
I'll attempt to be more conscientious with this year's list, hahaha.
Cheers.
----
1. After Dark - Haruki Murakami
Eyes mark the shape of the city.
Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature-or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flickr and flair up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.
This was the first Haruki Murakami book I read, and it's setting left a deep impression on me. As seen in previous years (2009/2008), I have a soft spot for the underbellies of Asian cities, particularly Japanese ones. No one does noir-ish stuff as good as Japanese writers, somehow. I would and could launch into a pseudo-cultural commentary here about the reasons why Japan is so potent with this sort of stuff, but I shall refrain.
After Dark essentially follows a young woman around Japan (literally) after dark, when the last metro trains for the suburbs leave central Tokyo. She meets a whole host of characters of the nocturnal sort, cafe waitresses, musicians and even love hotel workers/working girls as she struggles to come to terms with her own feelings about her supernaturally comatose sister. I was left feeling with a strange sense of unease at the end, and didn't really like the supernatural bits about the sister. Still it was an overall transfixing narrative.
2. Wild Swans - Jung Chang
At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China. The year was 1924 and China was in chaos. Much of it, including Manchuria, where my grandmother lived, was ruled by warlords. The liaison was arranged by her father, a police officer in the provincial town of Yixian in southwest Manchuria, about a hundred miles north of the Great Wall and 250 miles northeast of Peking.
2010 also marks the introduction of non-fiction books into the list, the next being Jon Ronson's Them. I remember lugging the super thick and battered copy of Wild Swans all the way to work, in hopes of a slow day as M/s A when I worked for them last year so I could read instead. A wonderfully told story of three generations of her family, following the ups and downs of the past few decades of Chinese history, this is a must to gain a first-person understanding of China during the Maoist era. The sheer scale and length of the narrative alone makes it a true, modern day epic.
I just don't trust her take on Mao from a historical point of view.
3. Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Do not set foot in my office. That's Dad's rule. But the phone'd rung twenty-five times. Normal people give up after ten or eleven, unless it's a matter of life or death. Don't they? Dad's got an answering machine like James Garner's in The Rockford Files with big reels of tape. But he's stopped leaving it switched on recently. Thirty rings the phone got to. Julia couldn't hear it up in her converted attic 'cause "Don't You Want Me?" by the Human League was thumping out dead loud. Forty rings. Mum couldn't hear 'cause the washing machine was on berserk cycle and she was hoovering the living room. Fifty rings. That was just not normal. S'pose Dad had been mangled by a juggernaut on the M5 and the police only had this phone number 'cause all his other ID's got charred? We could lose out our final chance to see our charred father in the terminal ward.
I loved Black Swan Green. I love David Mitchell. There is just something to his writing that sweeps me away, the way he writes is so clear and concise, yet the words still maintain a musicality. Little bits of the book jumped out at me, like being amused about that his father works for Greenland, a grocery store in the UK (hahaha, Iceland anyone?). Then there was the story about how Black Swan Green got it's name: the locals thought it'd be ironic. But there were the wonderfully crafted scenes of the slow breakdown of relations between his parents. The fight about the rockery was so perfectly crafted, conveying the strain between his parents, about how people fight seemingly little battles as a front to larger ones. The fight about the rockery was essentially one of a power struggle between his parents, with an extremely comedically tragic ending as the expensive koi gets eaten by a heron. Then of course there's the father's affair. Black Swan Green is not just a novel about Jason, the young protagonist, but about his parents and their struggle to find meaning in their middle ages.
4. Such a Long Journey - Rohinton Mistry
The first light in the morning barely illuminated the sky as Gustard Noble faced eastwards to offer his orisons to Ahura Mazda. The hour was approaching six, and up in the compound's solitary tree the sparrows began to call. Gustard listened to their chirping every morning while reciting his kusti prayers. There was something reassuring about it. Always, the sparrows were first; the cawing of crows came later.
Rohinton Mistry, is another master storyteller. Marrying a straightforward prose style, it made all the disturbing icky bits all the more clear an image in one's mind. Especially when it came to Tehmul and the doll, I remember having to put down the book and walk away for a while because I couldn't take the imagery. I replicate bits of it here for your pleasure:-
"Dilnavaz began undressing the doll… the pearl necklace, shoes, stockings, came off one by one, as Tehmul watched, fascinated. When she started to unbutton the dress, he became quite restless.
'OK Tehmul, pay attention,' said Gustard. 'You know what to do with this?' But Tehmul was engrossed in the undressing of the doll. Dilnavaz was down to the underclothing when a trickle of saliva started to descend from one corner of his mouth.
…On the way out he hesitated. The doll was stripped down to it's anatomically vague pink plaster. 'Ohhhh.' His nostrils flared; his mouth began to move in a manner of a ruminant's; a hand reached out."
Then there was the bit about Tehmul and him begging the prostitutes:-
"Pleasepleaseonceonly. Onceonlyonce. Fastfastrubbingpleaseonceonly. Pleasetakemoneypleaseplease. Letmetouchletmepressonceonly."
I died reading that. Rohinton Mistry wrote it so well. It's like watching a train wreck, but in prose form.
There were also a lot of memorable, strand out scenes in the book which struck me. There was the bit about the chicken, where Gustard fails at an attempt to relieve his childhood by killing a chicken because his children start to see it as a pet. Then there's his fight with his oldest son, Sohrab. Then his best friend Dinshawji's behaviour and his subsequent death. Dilvanaz's attempts to right her family problems through magic limes given to her by the neighbour, Miss Kutpitia. So many different intersecting strands of narrative, all sewn up together so well.
5. Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
A classic well deserving of it's status in literature, The Great Gatsby married both a wonderfully written narrative with a simple story. Same can't be said for Tender is the Night, which I read in Dec 2010 and absolutely hated.
6. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the back of the cab as it lurches forward in traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Peirce & Peirce and twenty six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
One of the most disturbing pieces of literature I have ever read in my life, American Psycho nonetheless stands out for it's sheer ability to get to the heart of the darkest human psyches, and darkly compared the to the modern capitalist world. Bret Easton Ellis manages to craft Patrick Bateman, the literal American Psycho, into a character one can sympathise (but not empathise!) with. His brutal murders of prostitutes (HORRIFYING) are contrasted with insights into a deeply fractured mind. Easton Ellis' characterisations of Bateman's panic attacks are altogether so perfect and on the dot, and the way Bateman uses music as a numbing tool to block out his mind when he's using a chainsaw to saw someone to death, is sheer literary genius. Definitely one of the most memorable books on this list.
7. The Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri
After her mother's death, Ruma's father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he'd never seen. In the past year he had visited France, Holland, and most recently Italy. There were package tours, traveling in the countryside, each meal and museum and hotel prearranged. He was gone for two, three, sometimes four weeks at a time. When he was away Ruma did not hear from him. Each time, she kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news, to make sure there hadn't been a plane crash anywhere in the world
Jhumpa Lahiri's words and chosen language are unremarkable in their accessibility and mundanity, but these only serve as a backdrop, a reflector even, in the stories she tells. How her words reach deep inside into your emotions, caress them and make you empathise as much as you were the characters themselves. She is a magical weaver of worlds, with the material of the common man. Definitely one of the only writers of short stories that I trust.
8. A Short History of Tractors in Ukaranian - Marina Lewycka
Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed up memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.
I give this book, and highly recommend it, to all my close friends. This was also, coincidentally the first book I read of the year, and I read it on Pulau Sibu when I was on a holiday with my parents over the 2009/2010 new year. It was not even my book: the sea wind battered copy was borrowed from the little hotel's roving bookshelf. It apparently first belonged to the owner, who then left it there for the pleasure of the guests. My dad first stumbled upon it when he gave up reading Nicholas Spark's The Notebook, and he recommended it to me after I had tore through Ha Jin's War Trash (see 2009's list).
It was absolutely hilarious and heartwarming, all rolled into a ball. I was introduced to a world of Toshiba Apples, Botticellian Breasts and Lada cars, complete with an actual history of tractors. I literally rolled over with laughter at multiple parts. Somehow, Lewycka's first novel proved to be the best written of all her present novels.
9. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
'What's it gonna be then, eh?'
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what theses mestos were like, things changing so skorry theses days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog and All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I'm starting off the story with.
This was another book that was hard to read, for it's extremely violent content. Of course compared to American Psycho, reading this while on my trip to Amsterdam was comparatively much easier. Nonetheless the senseless acts of violence was quite jarring, and I especially felt horrid when I read about them attacking the old man. At least Patrick Bateman attacked bums and prostitutes quickly, much unlike this lot which enjoyed violence for violence's sake. Still, Burgess managed to create in Alex a likeable enough character - you see his love for music, the power struggle within his group, his attempts at redemption. What really struck me the most through was the role of the Priest/Pastor (I forget which now) in the book: he maintains that by the authorities forcibly removing Alex's ability to commit violence, they are taking away his humanity, his ability to make decisions no matter how reprehensible.
Throught provoking.
10. Them: Adventures with Extremists - Jon Ronson
It was a balmy Saturday afternoon in Trafalgar Square in summertime, and Omar Bakri Mohammed was declaring Holy War on Britain. He stood on a podium at the front of Nelson's Column and announced that he would not rest until he saw the Black Flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. There was much cheering. The space had been rented out to him by Westminister Council.
And thus so begins Them, with one of the most awesome beginning paragraphs I have read in my 21 odd years. Ronson managed to put a hilarious spin to what could've arguably been a very dry topic. Instead the way he documents his encounters with the extremists, like Omar Bakri giving out flyers at Holborn station, another's insistence that the world is secretly run by alien lizards, plus interviews with the modern KKK, is hilarious. Then there are the sobering bits, of governments gone simply mad and eliminating viewed extremists with no prejudice. What emerges is a rollicking ball of amusement. Next to Tractors, this is one of the other books I have made a point to give to friends as a gift, because it is simply worth reading. Such a hidden gem, considering I bought it for £2 for my favourite bookshop in Oxford.
11A. We Are All Made of Glue - Marina Lewycka
The first time I met Wonder Boy, he pissed on me. I suppose he was trying to warn me off, which was quite prescient when you consider how things turned out.
One afternoon in late October, somewhere between Stoke Newington and Highbury, I'd ventured into an unfamiliar street, and come across and entrance of a cobbled lane that led in between two high garden walls. After about fifty metres the lane opened out into a grassy circle and I found myself standing in front of a big double-fronted house, half derelict and smothered in ivy, so completely tucked away behind the gardens of the neighbouring houses that you'd never have guessed it was there, crouched behind a straggly privet hedge and a thicket of self-seeded ash and maple saplings. I assumed it was uninhabited - who could live in a place like this? Something was carved on the gatepost. I pulled the ivy aside and read: Canaan house. Canaan - even the name exuded a musty whiff of holiness.
Dealing with the protagonist, Georgie, undergoing a new separation from her husband. As she fights her own heartbreak and geriatrics for the discounted Sainsbury food, she runs into a host of new characters in her life - most significantly her elderly neighbour Naomi. Some bits made me cry, some bits made me laugh like mad. Some bits struck me with their meaning. But yet somehow, the ending made me feel a little dissatisfied. Hence We Are All Made of Glue barely made the list, and pales far in comparison to Tractors.
11B. The Way Things Look to Me - Roopa Farooki
Asif Declan Kalil Murphy has a brooding resentment of his name, and by extension, of his deceased parents, although he resents them for many more things than his name, up to and including their untimely departure from life. The trouble with his name he thinks, is that it promises so much more - it promises that he will be interesting and exotic, larger than life, Irish charm and whimsy blended with South Asian mysticism and romance. Asif finds it impossible to live up to his shining name, and so shudders moth-like just behind it; avoiding introductions and hiding behind initials.
I was drawn to this book because one of the characters in the story is a high functioning autistic. I smiled at the bits of her I recognised in my brother. Rather, this book was about the impact of the autistic child on the family's relations, one of the more honest bits of writing about autism I've seen to be honest. In the bitter sister, I recognised bits of myself growing up. In the brother, I recognised the role I'd soon have to undertake as sole caregiver. The characters were likeable enough, yet somehow as a whole it rang slightly hollow at the end.
Disappointments
1. Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami): spent most of the end bits of the book going WTF?!
2. Tender is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald): felt that Fitzgerald was being overly self-indulgent, too needlessly wordy
3. Two Caravans (Marina Lewycka): narrative too scattered and messy
4. Possession (A. S. Byatt): extreme and gratuitous literary wanking, stopped reading 1/3 through lest I act on my impulse to immolate the book and it's annoying characters
-----
I'll attempt to be more conscientious with this year's list, hahaha.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Drei
Since I have not been doing this for some time, I have decided to write about 3 books that I have read recently.
Imre Kertész's Detective Story took a while to get a hold on me. At the end however, I was left with a fairly discernable impression. It was not enough however, to strike quite a resounding chord with me. A good read nonetheless.
Anne Tyler's Digging to America was highly entertaining. Jumping from narrator to narrator, I especially loved the bits the grandmother Maryam narrated. I even brought the book the school on multiple occasions to read when I was between classes. Still at the end, it seemed to lack a little something (or as Jia puts it, umami).
The best of all 3 however, was Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. The titular story did not impress me as much as the latter three short stories did. When it comes to a well executed and finished story, Capote is simply one of the best. The problem I usually have with short stories is that they ring hollow when they finish. Sometimes, you even wonder about the motivation for even wanting to write them. They tell something unsatisfactorily and answer nothing. This was especially the case for Enright's Taking Pictures and D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum. Capote however tells and sums up a good yarn.
Imre Kertész's Detective Story took a while to get a hold on me. At the end however, I was left with a fairly discernable impression. It was not enough however, to strike quite a resounding chord with me. A good read nonetheless.
Anne Tyler's Digging to America was highly entertaining. Jumping from narrator to narrator, I especially loved the bits the grandmother Maryam narrated. I even brought the book the school on multiple occasions to read when I was between classes. Still at the end, it seemed to lack a little something (or as Jia puts it, umami).
The best of all 3 however, was Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. The titular story did not impress me as much as the latter three short stories did. When it comes to a well executed and finished story, Capote is simply one of the best. The problem I usually have with short stories is that they ring hollow when they finish. Sometimes, you even wonder about the motivation for even wanting to write them. They tell something unsatisfactorily and answer nothing. This was especially the case for Enright's Taking Pictures and D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum. Capote however tells and sums up a good yarn.
Saturday, January 08, 2011
OXON & BOOKS: a list
Yesterday I popped up North for a whirlwind visit to dear old man in Oxford. As usual I paid my respects to The Last Bookshop, £2 for all books, located near St. Aldgate's. The Last Bookshop stocks a delightful array of books, some exquisite photography books (for when I get my own proper flat and proper coffee table I presume) and general literature. There were loads of tempting buys, vying for my attention like Chabon's Kavalier and Clay (didn't get it though) and Nemirovsky. I managed to stop myself at 5 books though:-
Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion
Imre Kertesz - Detective Story
P. D. James - Cover Her Face
Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
Bret Easton Ellis - The Informers
Along with the generous £25 Amazon voucher I got from Christoph's mum for Christmas, I also got:-
J. M. Coetzee - Disgrace
Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red
Edmund de Waal - The Hare with Amber Eyes
Anne Tyler - Digging to America
Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
I am currently reading Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm.
I will finish and post the very delayed 2010 list next. I promise!
Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion
Imre Kertesz - Detective Story
P. D. James - Cover Her Face
Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
Bret Easton Ellis - The Informers
Along with the generous £25 Amazon voucher I got from Christoph's mum for Christmas, I also got:-
J. M. Coetzee - Disgrace
Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red
Edmund de Waal - The Hare with Amber Eyes
Anne Tyler - Digging to America
Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
I am currently reading Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm.
I will finish and post the very delayed 2010 list next. I promise!
Monday, December 28, 2009
Top Ten Reads for 2009
2009 was a strange year for reading. It started out with much reading, and then when university started for me, went along limpingly. There was simply too much already to read for school and my eyes were strained (though evidently not strained enough to stop me playing Warcraft III). Nonetheless the last 3 slots of my list still managed to be filled up sufficiently during that time period. Thus with much effort, I present my Top Ten Reads for 2009. Last’s years list is present here.
The List (not in any order, though some obviously take precedence in my mind):
1. Ha Jin’s War Trash
“Below my navel stretches a long tattoo that says “FUCK… U… S…” The skin above those dots has shriveled as though scarred by burns. Like a talisman, the tattoo has protected me in China for almost five decades.”
I haven’t even finished reading this one yet. Yet there was a part about the prisoners of war being separated under the watch of the mini Nationalist movement in their POW camp and how the protagonist was unable to signal to his friend that he decided to stick with the CCP group despite all the threats and violence of the Nationalists,
“Later I heard from a fellow who had joined us in the afternoon that after Daijain returned to my former company [had decided to stay under the Nationalists], he kept asking others, “Where’s Feng Yan? Did you see him?” They all shook their heads. For hours he wept quietly alone. What had happened that morning was that before entering a screening tent [to determine where they’d go], he was sandwiched between two pro-Nationalists, who had told him I had just made “the wise choice”. So Daijian declared to the arbiters that he would go to Taiwan too.”
The matter of fact manner in which the narrative was done blew me away. You can feel the sorrow in that incident, and yet not once does the narrator’s voice break. I found it strongly reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Despite of the huge disappointment I found Ha Jin’s Waiting, this has more than redeemed him in my eyes – and I’m only midway through this book.
2. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“What about a teakettle? What if the sprout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by The Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’etre, which is a French expression that I know.”
Another heartbreakingly beautiful piece by Safran Foer. I cried. From the young narrator boy, who keeps distracting himself with quests, trying to connect in his own way with his dead father, to delude himself that he’s still alive and merely hiding – to his grandmother, the heartbroken woman still in love with a man who disappeared out of sadness years ago. Most poetic and memorable still is the old man so sad that he cannot speak anymore, so he carries around a sketchbook so he can still communicate with the outside world, thinking about the woman he fell in love with and lost to World War Two. Centered around momentous events like Sept 11 (how the boy’s father died) and the upheaval of World War Two with the characters all richly fleshed out, this is one hell of an ambitious and successful piece of writing.
3. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
I think I left my copy at my Aunt’s place in the US, which is a pity since when I read the first lines to retype here, I remember all the exact emotions I felt when reading the book. I remember a few things, more well fleshed out characters, more personal tragedies (for some reason I remember a Doctor friend with delusions of grandeur who died tragically and sadly, without his intended mark in the world), more interlinks with History – the formation of Pakistan in this case, more excellent narration. I think I spot a trend here in my preference for books.
As I was telling JLC when I saw him on Sat during a class outing, there was a part where his mother goes to meet her old lover. Her marriage was a bad one, and she evidently still loved her old flame. They would meet in a café in back alleys, and all they’d do is hold hands. I remember the phrase he used was something along the lines of “talking hands” and how by that mere touch they contained all the love they had for each other deep inside, but that was all they could do. Damn I hate not having the book with me. Either way that paragraph alone sealed its place in my Top Ten list for this year.
4. V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas
“Ten weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James, Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer.”
Mohun Biswas, is the saddest loser you will ever read about. Nothing ever goes right from him. From an accidental marriage, to being dominated by a matriarch, to his numerous attempts to find a house to call his own, he goes through life constantly disappointed with little high points here and in between. Saddest though, was his son who experienced and saw first hand all these disappointments that his father carried around with him. A son the father loved so much, but yet ceased contact after leaving to study abroad. Hilarious for the absurdity, mollifying for the schadenfreude, saddening for all the disappointments, this is a wonderful book. Thank you Arjun for recommending it to me.
5. Rob Thomas’s Rats Saw God
“Though I tried to clear my head of the effects of the fat, resiny doobie I’d polished off an hour before, things were still fuzzy as I stumbled into senior counselor Jeff DeMouy’s office. I had learned the hard way that Mrs. Schmidt, my physics teacher, was less naïve than her Laura Ashley wardrobe suggested. I made the mistake of arriving in her class sporting quarter-sized pupils and a British Sterling-drenched blue jean jacket.”
A dark horse, this one almost didn’t make the list. This in fact dethroned Krauss’ A History of Love from the list (more on this below in Honourable Mentions). A coming of age story, this grows from the happy care free optimism of the teenage years – amusing Dadist society wrecking hell on the school’s annual homecoming float to disappointment and a sad forceful ejection from bliss at the betrayal of a first love and betrayal of a friend, and the realization of a son that he had wronged a father. Unconventional, yet readable and memorable, I remember the sinking feeling I felt as he discovered his girlfriend cheating, and the tears prickling at my eyes.
6. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies
“At the tea stall Mr. and Mrs. Das bickered about who should take Tina to the toilet. Eventually Mrs. Das relented when Mr. Das pointed out that he had given the girl her bath the night before. In the rearview mirror Mr. Kapasi watched as Mrs. Das emerged slowly from his bulkly white Ambassador, dragging her shaved, largely bare legs across the seat. She did not hold the little girl’s hand as they walked to the rest room.”
A richly written book, Lahiri’s narrative is the quiet-covering-disappointment-and-sadness sort of narrative I associate with Ishiguro and the other Indian writers I have read. Perhaps it’s an Asian thing. She possesses evocative yet straight forward language, but the feminine touch of digging into the inner painful and disappointing emotions of the soul. I once said in a presentation (probably earning the ire of a certain John Connor, not of the Terminator sort) that Rushdie could never have written The God of Small Things, simply because he was male. I am reminded of that rather strong statement when I think of Lahiri. She knows how to relay enough to make one sorrowful, but not tear up.
7. Natsuo Kirino’s Out
“She got to the parking lot earlier than usual. The thick, damp July darkness engulfed her as she stepped out of the car. Perhaps it was the heat and the humidity, but the night seemed especially black and heavy. Feeling a bit short of breath, Masako Katori looked up at the starless night sky.”
Possibly the scariest book I read all year, Out was less elegantly crafted than Grotesque from last year, but nonetheless equally thrilling with it’s succession of characters seeking to break out from their bleak and disappointing existences with violent consequences. Out had one of the most unforgettable characters ever, Masako Katori, and the ending with her and gangster Satake is equal parts horror and equal parts darkly insightful of the darkest depths of human minds. There were also points of time that I couldn’t read the book right before I slept, because it created such an adrenaline rush in me that I was unable to sleep – such was the impact of the book on my psyche.
8. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside of literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
Yet another book I found near impossible to put down, The Secret History features yet another host of unforgettable characters in their flaws, idiosyncrasies and intelligence. Similar but yet dissimilar enough to Out, the book is centered around the build up to the death of Bunny Corcoran, his death, and the consequences faced by an increasingly paranoid group of friends who soon start to break down mentally. The writing and pacing were thrilling and the characters were nicely and plausibly woven together, though the part about the Bacchanal was at best dodgy. Also features an unreliable narrator (as Daryl pointed out).
9. Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondorous Life of Oscar Wao
Another book that has been left somewhere but home (London in this case), I am sadly unable to quote the opening lines once more. Featuring an interesting narrative (multiple narrators, distinctly different styles of narration for each, plentiful sprinklings of Spanish) and a wonderful plot (historical links to the Dominican Republic, semi-tragic characters and the tragedy that surrounds them), this was yet another wonderful tome. I remember thinking of how similar it was to Eugenide’s Middlesex when I was reading it, of how there was a passing of narrative from Grandmother (I think) to Mother, Mother to Son.
10. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
“My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but they actually want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years.”
Yet another one of those really sad but in an indirect way sort of writers, I started sniffling when I reached the poignant ending where she drives off and steps out of the car to feel the air whirling around her. Set in a dystopian future, I initially found following this book rather confusing. Yet the circumstances of the book made it infinitely more interesting, bringing up the concept of cloning (and also humanising an current ethical issue) and how it vastly constrained the lives of the characters to their fates – making it all the more sadder. They are sealed in their fates, and though they try to prolong their lives, it does not change their situation the least. Another quietly heartbreaking piece.
Honourable mentions:
Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and The Professor (novel inclusions of mathematical formulae, well constructed characters and their connections)
Irvine Welsh’s Porno (same mad cap gang, but less mad men narrating and more uncomfortable Begbie violence)
Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (smooth and well written, enjoyable)
Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo (horrifyingly vivid, jarring to read on a flight back to Philadelphia)
Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth (wonderful yarn, kept me awake)
Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (mostly because I can say I’VE READ IT!, though it was an enjoyable and amusing read, all 797 pages of it)
Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love (reads like a Safran Foer wannabe, especially his Extremely Loud and Incredibly close. I also just found out they got married. I want to read the books of their kids. On another note, I think my edition might have hampered my appreciation as I was told there was a special arrangement to the typography of the text that I do not remember when recollecting the book)
-----
And thus 2009 is almost finished hurtling towards its end.
The List (not in any order, though some obviously take precedence in my mind):
1. Ha Jin’s War Trash
“Below my navel stretches a long tattoo that says “FUCK… U… S…” The skin above those dots has shriveled as though scarred by burns. Like a talisman, the tattoo has protected me in China for almost five decades.”
I haven’t even finished reading this one yet. Yet there was a part about the prisoners of war being separated under the watch of the mini Nationalist movement in their POW camp and how the protagonist was unable to signal to his friend that he decided to stick with the CCP group despite all the threats and violence of the Nationalists,
“Later I heard from a fellow who had joined us in the afternoon that after Daijain returned to my former company [had decided to stay under the Nationalists], he kept asking others, “Where’s Feng Yan? Did you see him?” They all shook their heads. For hours he wept quietly alone. What had happened that morning was that before entering a screening tent [to determine where they’d go], he was sandwiched between two pro-Nationalists, who had told him I had just made “the wise choice”. So Daijian declared to the arbiters that he would go to Taiwan too.”
The matter of fact manner in which the narrative was done blew me away. You can feel the sorrow in that incident, and yet not once does the narrator’s voice break. I found it strongly reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Despite of the huge disappointment I found Ha Jin’s Waiting, this has more than redeemed him in my eyes – and I’m only midway through this book.
2. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“What about a teakettle? What if the sprout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by The Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’etre, which is a French expression that I know.”
Another heartbreakingly beautiful piece by Safran Foer. I cried. From the young narrator boy, who keeps distracting himself with quests, trying to connect in his own way with his dead father, to delude himself that he’s still alive and merely hiding – to his grandmother, the heartbroken woman still in love with a man who disappeared out of sadness years ago. Most poetic and memorable still is the old man so sad that he cannot speak anymore, so he carries around a sketchbook so he can still communicate with the outside world, thinking about the woman he fell in love with and lost to World War Two. Centered around momentous events like Sept 11 (how the boy’s father died) and the upheaval of World War Two with the characters all richly fleshed out, this is one hell of an ambitious and successful piece of writing.
3. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
I think I left my copy at my Aunt’s place in the US, which is a pity since when I read the first lines to retype here, I remember all the exact emotions I felt when reading the book. I remember a few things, more well fleshed out characters, more personal tragedies (for some reason I remember a Doctor friend with delusions of grandeur who died tragically and sadly, without his intended mark in the world), more interlinks with History – the formation of Pakistan in this case, more excellent narration. I think I spot a trend here in my preference for books.
As I was telling JLC when I saw him on Sat during a class outing, there was a part where his mother goes to meet her old lover. Her marriage was a bad one, and she evidently still loved her old flame. They would meet in a café in back alleys, and all they’d do is hold hands. I remember the phrase he used was something along the lines of “talking hands” and how by that mere touch they contained all the love they had for each other deep inside, but that was all they could do. Damn I hate not having the book with me. Either way that paragraph alone sealed its place in my Top Ten list for this year.
4. V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas
“Ten weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James, Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer.”
Mohun Biswas, is the saddest loser you will ever read about. Nothing ever goes right from him. From an accidental marriage, to being dominated by a matriarch, to his numerous attempts to find a house to call his own, he goes through life constantly disappointed with little high points here and in between. Saddest though, was his son who experienced and saw first hand all these disappointments that his father carried around with him. A son the father loved so much, but yet ceased contact after leaving to study abroad. Hilarious for the absurdity, mollifying for the schadenfreude, saddening for all the disappointments, this is a wonderful book. Thank you Arjun for recommending it to me.
5. Rob Thomas’s Rats Saw God
“Though I tried to clear my head of the effects of the fat, resiny doobie I’d polished off an hour before, things were still fuzzy as I stumbled into senior counselor Jeff DeMouy’s office. I had learned the hard way that Mrs. Schmidt, my physics teacher, was less naïve than her Laura Ashley wardrobe suggested. I made the mistake of arriving in her class sporting quarter-sized pupils and a British Sterling-drenched blue jean jacket.”
A dark horse, this one almost didn’t make the list. This in fact dethroned Krauss’ A History of Love from the list (more on this below in Honourable Mentions). A coming of age story, this grows from the happy care free optimism of the teenage years – amusing Dadist society wrecking hell on the school’s annual homecoming float to disappointment and a sad forceful ejection from bliss at the betrayal of a first love and betrayal of a friend, and the realization of a son that he had wronged a father. Unconventional, yet readable and memorable, I remember the sinking feeling I felt as he discovered his girlfriend cheating, and the tears prickling at my eyes.
6. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies
“At the tea stall Mr. and Mrs. Das bickered about who should take Tina to the toilet. Eventually Mrs. Das relented when Mr. Das pointed out that he had given the girl her bath the night before. In the rearview mirror Mr. Kapasi watched as Mrs. Das emerged slowly from his bulkly white Ambassador, dragging her shaved, largely bare legs across the seat. She did not hold the little girl’s hand as they walked to the rest room.”
A richly written book, Lahiri’s narrative is the quiet-covering-disappointment-and-sadness sort of narrative I associate with Ishiguro and the other Indian writers I have read. Perhaps it’s an Asian thing. She possesses evocative yet straight forward language, but the feminine touch of digging into the inner painful and disappointing emotions of the soul. I once said in a presentation (probably earning the ire of a certain John Connor, not of the Terminator sort) that Rushdie could never have written The God of Small Things, simply because he was male. I am reminded of that rather strong statement when I think of Lahiri. She knows how to relay enough to make one sorrowful, but not tear up.
7. Natsuo Kirino’s Out
“She got to the parking lot earlier than usual. The thick, damp July darkness engulfed her as she stepped out of the car. Perhaps it was the heat and the humidity, but the night seemed especially black and heavy. Feeling a bit short of breath, Masako Katori looked up at the starless night sky.”
Possibly the scariest book I read all year, Out was less elegantly crafted than Grotesque from last year, but nonetheless equally thrilling with it’s succession of characters seeking to break out from their bleak and disappointing existences with violent consequences. Out had one of the most unforgettable characters ever, Masako Katori, and the ending with her and gangster Satake is equal parts horror and equal parts darkly insightful of the darkest depths of human minds. There were also points of time that I couldn’t read the book right before I slept, because it created such an adrenaline rush in me that I was unable to sleep – such was the impact of the book on my psyche.
8. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside of literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
Yet another book I found near impossible to put down, The Secret History features yet another host of unforgettable characters in their flaws, idiosyncrasies and intelligence. Similar but yet dissimilar enough to Out, the book is centered around the build up to the death of Bunny Corcoran, his death, and the consequences faced by an increasingly paranoid group of friends who soon start to break down mentally. The writing and pacing were thrilling and the characters were nicely and plausibly woven together, though the part about the Bacchanal was at best dodgy. Also features an unreliable narrator (as Daryl pointed out).
9. Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondorous Life of Oscar Wao
Another book that has been left somewhere but home (London in this case), I am sadly unable to quote the opening lines once more. Featuring an interesting narrative (multiple narrators, distinctly different styles of narration for each, plentiful sprinklings of Spanish) and a wonderful plot (historical links to the Dominican Republic, semi-tragic characters and the tragedy that surrounds them), this was yet another wonderful tome. I remember thinking of how similar it was to Eugenide’s Middlesex when I was reading it, of how there was a passing of narrative from Grandmother (I think) to Mother, Mother to Son.
10. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
“My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but they actually want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years.”
Yet another one of those really sad but in an indirect way sort of writers, I started sniffling when I reached the poignant ending where she drives off and steps out of the car to feel the air whirling around her. Set in a dystopian future, I initially found following this book rather confusing. Yet the circumstances of the book made it infinitely more interesting, bringing up the concept of cloning (and also humanising an current ethical issue) and how it vastly constrained the lives of the characters to their fates – making it all the more sadder. They are sealed in their fates, and though they try to prolong their lives, it does not change their situation the least. Another quietly heartbreaking piece.
Honourable mentions:
Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and The Professor (novel inclusions of mathematical formulae, well constructed characters and their connections)
Irvine Welsh’s Porno (same mad cap gang, but less mad men narrating and more uncomfortable Begbie violence)
Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (smooth and well written, enjoyable)
Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo (horrifyingly vivid, jarring to read on a flight back to Philadelphia)
Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth (wonderful yarn, kept me awake)
Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (mostly because I can say I’VE READ IT!, though it was an enjoyable and amusing read, all 797 pages of it)
Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love (reads like a Safran Foer wannabe, especially his Extremely Loud and Incredibly close. I also just found out they got married. I want to read the books of their kids. On another note, I think my edition might have hampered my appreciation as I was told there was a special arrangement to the typography of the text that I do not remember when recollecting the book)
-----
And thus 2009 is almost finished hurtling towards its end.
Monday, August 31, 2009
A Comparison of Two Coming of Age Stories
*I had 5 hours of sleep yesterday and had to rush to work a stressful 4 hours in the office after being called back suddenly: forgive me if this post is incoherent.
I recently finished reading the 'indie' favourite The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Rats Saw God. Both stories followed the lives of male protagonists as they go through High School, fall in love and so on. They were also written in the '90s and littered with the requisite pop culture references. However the similarities sort of ended there.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower pretty much followed what I expected, plenty of 'hip' literary references like Salinger and Rand (why the hell do indies love Rand anyway? Is there something they perceive about being an individual equate to being selfish?) and the requisite 'hip' music references to The Smiths. I laughed at some points because it was too indie for me. I must admit I enjoyed the personification of the narrator though, because I found I could really relate to him. I understood perfectly how he felt, and have actually felt that way before. However at the end of the I preferred Rats Saw God.
Rats Saw God on the other hand exceeded my expectations. I expected some Hunter Thompson-esque bunch of incongruity, but the originally perceived explosion of drugs never actually happened. No sheets of Mesculin were anywhere to be found. Instead it followed the life of a teenage boy who was relatively drug free until his senior year. I found the book utterly captivating. From the setting up of a highly amusing Dadist society to the ending which led to him fleeing Texas (which made me feel sick because of the memories it brought), it proved to be highly rewarding for a USD6 book.
I recently finished reading the 'indie' favourite The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Rats Saw God. Both stories followed the lives of male protagonists as they go through High School, fall in love and so on. They were also written in the '90s and littered with the requisite pop culture references. However the similarities sort of ended there.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower pretty much followed what I expected, plenty of 'hip' literary references like Salinger and Rand (why the hell do indies love Rand anyway? Is there something they perceive about being an individual equate to being selfish?) and the requisite 'hip' music references to The Smiths. I laughed at some points because it was too indie for me. I must admit I enjoyed the personification of the narrator though, because I found I could really relate to him. I understood perfectly how he felt, and have actually felt that way before. However at the end of the I preferred Rats Saw God.
Rats Saw God on the other hand exceeded my expectations. I expected some Hunter Thompson-esque bunch of incongruity, but the originally perceived explosion of drugs never actually happened. No sheets of Mesculin were anywhere to be found. Instead it followed the life of a teenage boy who was relatively drug free until his senior year. I found the book utterly captivating. From the setting up of a highly amusing Dadist society to the ending which led to him fleeing Texas (which made me feel sick because of the memories it brought), it proved to be highly rewarding for a USD6 book.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
The Top 10 Best Reads of 2008 is now officially over, and I declare Hierophant the winner (I'll pass you the choccy when I next see you). In choosing the books for this not-so-illustrious list I had a few select criteria; 1) attractiveness of plot 2) style of writing 3) the rapport I had with the characterisations of the characters 4) how much the story haunted me afterward. had Now let me continue with the list itself:
1. "It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone, in the comfort of Mr Farraday's Ford; an expedition which, as I forsee it, will take me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country, and may keep me away from Darlington Hall for as much as five or six days."
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
This book almost did not make my list for the reason that as well as it was written, I didn't readily take to the character of Stevens. However the saving grace that led it to finally appearing on this list (which is not in any numerical order whatsoever) was how much it haunted me afterward, from the missed connection between Steven and Miss Kenton to the overall sense of loss that I associate with the book.
2. "In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in The Times."
Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians/Ten Little Niggers
This was another book I had trouble with not because it didn't 100% fill out the criteria above but more because I was afraid whether such a book belonged on this list of mine since it was effectively a child's book. Eventually however the sheer superiority of her writing could not be denied entry to this list - it is truly the most well crafted and suspenseful mystery I have read in my life.
3. "My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother."
Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated
Initially amusing and highly irrelevant, I thought this would be one of many impactless books. However the stunning climax (if I can call it one) where the nature of the title is revealed - everything is illuminated - completely won me over. The use of 'illuminated', such a happy word being cruelly subverted into the cause of such abject horror completely won me over. There were many times I felt like crying when I read the book. That and heavy doses of magic realism.
4. "The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms."
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections
I haven't actually finished reading this book yet. However the half that I've read has quite blown me away and captivated my imagination. The characterisations of the Lambert family are done splendidly, the depth and breath of them allowing them to be painted as a group of sympathetic characters who are all in conflict with one another.
5. "The pubs, likesay, dead busy, full ay loco-locals and festival types, having a wee snort before heading off tae the next show. Some ay they looks okay... a bit heavy oan the hirays though, likesay."
Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting
Never before have I felt such rapport and sympathy for a bunch of ne'er do wells. From straight out loud laughing at the predicaments of Davie at his girlfriend's house, to cringing at Kelly's actions in Eating Out and the wtf/omg/lol/wtf happenings of Renton's drug filled world, this book is a masterpiece of imagination and style put together in a nice controversial package.
6. "Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it."
"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potatoes way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze.""
Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics
One night I stayed up till almost 4am reading this in bed. It is that good. One part literary and pop reference orgasm and other part fantastical mystery, this book blew me away in the middle of IOC season (I think, can't remember exactly when I read it, but I recall being distraught that I left it under my desk in school and asked Arjun to take it for me after Guitar Ensemble's FOA). The quirkiness of the illustrations in the book was also a nice touch which I really liked. The ending of the book make me all heart melt-ey too, in more ways than one.
7. "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January 1960; and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August 1974. Specialised readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, "Gender Identitiy in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites," published in the journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you've seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That's me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes."
Jeffery Eugenides's Middlesex
This book was first recommended to me by Xian Yi, followed by Daryl. Again another magic realism filled story that is large parts Heartbreaking, the epic nature of this storyline won me over easily (I'm such a sucker for those kinds of novels). I especially appreciated the part about Calliope and her longing for The Obscure Object because it reminded me of my own experiences (albeit less happening). The language of this book actually reminds me of The Corrections now, come to think of it.
8. "The train was late. Under the dim lamplight, the platform was cast in half shadow. As Meng left the train, a snowflake floated down and landed on his neck. The wind was blowing open his coat at the bottom. It produced a whistling sound which reminded him that the weather here in Tiancheng was colder than he'd expected. Bag in hand, he walked with the throng towards the station exit, and though he kept looking about him, he couldn't spot the Song Dynasty tower that he remembered. Besides the darkness and the lamplight, he saw nothing but the ungainly contours of the high-rises, which looked the same here as everywhere else. No doubt the buildings had blocked his view of the tower."
Su Tong's Madwoman on the Bridge
This was the main reason I chose to not use the opening paragraphs from short stories, simply because it would have been too easy to guess. The short stories in this novel run the gamut, from commentaries on the changing effervescent nature of China's culture nowadays to horror stories (think Stephen King) of rural China. Su Tong perfectly encapsulates modern day developing China with the excesses of the liberated city dwellers to the slow decay of rural urban centres - all with an underlying sense of increasing loss. Perfect.
9. "Whenever I meet a man, I catch myself wondering what our child would look life if we were to make a baby. It's practically second nature to me now. Whether he's handsome or ugly, old or young, a picture of our child flashes across our mind. My hair is light brown and feathery fine, and if his is jet black and coarse, then I predict our child's hair will be the perfect texture and colour. Wouldn't it? I always start out imaging the best possible scenarios for these children, but before long I've conjured up horrific versions from the very opposite ends of the spectrum."
Natsuo Kirino's Grotesque
The above is an example of why I love this book. The characterisations are stark, odd, disturbing and oh-so-mindblowingly-well-done. They just blew me away. The characters are all dark and unsympathetic, all unreliable narrators with faults teeming from every page which made them so haunting in my mind. The prose flows beautifully as well, another stark juxtaposition adding to the overall creepy nature of the book. This book is darkly beautiful and truly lives up to it's name - Grotesque.
10. "It was a queer, sultry summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I don't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers - goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves."
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar
Another author with a style of prose I am decidedly in love with, Plath's thinly veiled autobiography was simply the best book I read of 2008. Her depictions of a young woman's life being wrecked by depression were simultaneously horrifying and captivating. This novel has turned her into my favourite writer/poet. I even bought a biography about her I have yet to read.
-----
Honourable Mentions:
Yoko Ogawa's The Swimming Pool
David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars
-----
Thus this ends my list for 2008. Whether this will turn into a yearly thing remains to be seen. Happy Boxing Day (it's 1:12 am now)!
1. "It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone, in the comfort of Mr Farraday's Ford; an expedition which, as I forsee it, will take me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country, and may keep me away from Darlington Hall for as much as five or six days."
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
This book almost did not make my list for the reason that as well as it was written, I didn't readily take to the character of Stevens. However the saving grace that led it to finally appearing on this list (which is not in any numerical order whatsoever) was how much it haunted me afterward, from the missed connection between Steven and Miss Kenton to the overall sense of loss that I associate with the book.
2. "In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in The Times."
Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians/Ten Little Niggers
This was another book I had trouble with not because it didn't 100% fill out the criteria above but more because I was afraid whether such a book belonged on this list of mine since it was effectively a child's book. Eventually however the sheer superiority of her writing could not be denied entry to this list - it is truly the most well crafted and suspenseful mystery I have read in my life.
3. "My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother."
Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated
Initially amusing and highly irrelevant, I thought this would be one of many impactless books. However the stunning climax (if I can call it one) where the nature of the title is revealed - everything is illuminated - completely won me over. The use of 'illuminated', such a happy word being cruelly subverted into the cause of such abject horror completely won me over. There were many times I felt like crying when I read the book. That and heavy doses of magic realism.
4. "The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms."
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections
I haven't actually finished reading this book yet. However the half that I've read has quite blown me away and captivated my imagination. The characterisations of the Lambert family are done splendidly, the depth and breath of them allowing them to be painted as a group of sympathetic characters who are all in conflict with one another.
5. "The pubs, likesay, dead busy, full ay loco-locals and festival types, having a wee snort before heading off tae the next show. Some ay they looks okay... a bit heavy oan the hirays though, likesay."
Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting
Never before have I felt such rapport and sympathy for a bunch of ne'er do wells. From straight out loud laughing at the predicaments of Davie at his girlfriend's house, to cringing at Kelly's actions in Eating Out and the wtf/omg/lol/wtf happenings of Renton's drug filled world, this book is a masterpiece of imagination and style put together in a nice controversial package.
6. "Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it."
"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potatoes way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze.""
Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics
One night I stayed up till almost 4am reading this in bed. It is that good. One part literary and pop reference orgasm and other part fantastical mystery, this book blew me away in the middle of IOC season (I think, can't remember exactly when I read it, but I recall being distraught that I left it under my desk in school and asked Arjun to take it for me after Guitar Ensemble's FOA). The quirkiness of the illustrations in the book was also a nice touch which I really liked. The ending of the book make me all heart melt-ey too, in more ways than one.
7. "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January 1960; and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August 1974. Specialised readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, "Gender Identitiy in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites," published in the journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you've seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That's me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes."
Jeffery Eugenides's Middlesex
This book was first recommended to me by Xian Yi, followed by Daryl. Again another magic realism filled story that is large parts Heartbreaking, the epic nature of this storyline won me over easily (I'm such a sucker for those kinds of novels). I especially appreciated the part about Calliope and her longing for The Obscure Object because it reminded me of my own experiences (albeit less happening). The language of this book actually reminds me of The Corrections now, come to think of it.
8. "The train was late. Under the dim lamplight, the platform was cast in half shadow. As Meng left the train, a snowflake floated down and landed on his neck. The wind was blowing open his coat at the bottom. It produced a whistling sound which reminded him that the weather here in Tiancheng was colder than he'd expected. Bag in hand, he walked with the throng towards the station exit, and though he kept looking about him, he couldn't spot the Song Dynasty tower that he remembered. Besides the darkness and the lamplight, he saw nothing but the ungainly contours of the high-rises, which looked the same here as everywhere else. No doubt the buildings had blocked his view of the tower."
Su Tong's Madwoman on the Bridge
This was the main reason I chose to not use the opening paragraphs from short stories, simply because it would have been too easy to guess. The short stories in this novel run the gamut, from commentaries on the changing effervescent nature of China's culture nowadays to horror stories (think Stephen King) of rural China. Su Tong perfectly encapsulates modern day developing China with the excesses of the liberated city dwellers to the slow decay of rural urban centres - all with an underlying sense of increasing loss. Perfect.
9. "Whenever I meet a man, I catch myself wondering what our child would look life if we were to make a baby. It's practically second nature to me now. Whether he's handsome or ugly, old or young, a picture of our child flashes across our mind. My hair is light brown and feathery fine, and if his is jet black and coarse, then I predict our child's hair will be the perfect texture and colour. Wouldn't it? I always start out imaging the best possible scenarios for these children, but before long I've conjured up horrific versions from the very opposite ends of the spectrum."
Natsuo Kirino's Grotesque
The above is an example of why I love this book. The characterisations are stark, odd, disturbing and oh-so-mindblowingly-well-done. They just blew me away. The characters are all dark and unsympathetic, all unreliable narrators with faults teeming from every page which made them so haunting in my mind. The prose flows beautifully as well, another stark juxtaposition adding to the overall creepy nature of the book. This book is darkly beautiful and truly lives up to it's name - Grotesque.
10. "It was a queer, sultry summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I don't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers - goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves."
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar
Another author with a style of prose I am decidedly in love with, Plath's thinly veiled autobiography was simply the best book I read of 2008. Her depictions of a young woman's life being wrecked by depression were simultaneously horrifying and captivating. This novel has turned her into my favourite writer/poet. I even bought a biography about her I have yet to read.
-----
Honourable Mentions:
Yoko Ogawa's The Swimming Pool
David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars
-----
Thus this ends my list for 2008. Whether this will turn into a yearly thing remains to be seen. Happy Boxing Day (it's 1:12 am now)!
Thursday, December 18, 2008
2008 is quickly (rather regrettably) coming to an end. This thus calls for a list of sorts to mark the end of such a topsy turvy year that started out like shit and is now ending on the best of possible notes imagined (prom, Cambodia, Thailand). It is now my great pleasure to present the Top 10 Best Reads of 2008 - a list I have been gleefully compiling in my head since I started studying for the IB exams. This list will have a twist though, instead of just listing down the titles and reasons for why the book is on my list, I shall instead just type out a sample of the opening paragraph/bunch of really long lines (or from one of the short stories within if it's a collection of short stories) and leave it for you guys to guess. The winner gets a very nice bar of chocolate!
-----
1. "It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone, in the comfort of Mr Farraday's Ford; an expedition which, as I forsee it, will take me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country, and may keep me away from Darlington Hall for as much as five or six days."
2. "In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in The Times."
3. "My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother."
4. "The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms."
5. "The pubs, likesay, dead busy, full ay loco-locals and festival types, having a wee snort before heading off tae the next show. Some ay they looks okay... a bit heavy oan the hirays though, likesay."
6. "Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it."
"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potatoes way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze.""
7. "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January 1960; and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August 1974. Specialised readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, "Gender Identitiy in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites," published in the journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you've seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That's me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes."
8. "The train was late. Under the dim lamplight, the platform was cast in half shadow. As Meng left the train, a snowflake floated down and landed on his neck. The wind was blowing open his coat at the bottom. It produced a whistling sound which reminded him that the weather here in Tiancheng was colder than he'd expected. Bag in hand, he walked with the throng towards the station exit, and though he kept looking about him, he couldn't spot the Song Dynasty tower that he remembered. Besides the darkness and the lamplight, he saw nothing but the ungainly contours of the high-rises, which looked the same here as everywhere else. No doubt the buildings had blocked his view of the tower."
9. "Whenever I meet a man, I catch myself wondering what our child would look life if we were to make a baby. It's practically second nature to me now. Whether he's handsome or ugly, old or young, a picture of our child flashes across our mind. My hair is light brown and feathery fine, and if his is jet black and coarse, then I predict our child's hair will be the perfect texture and colour. Wouldn't it? I always start out imaging the best possible scenarios for these children, but before long I've conjured up horrific versions from the very opposite ends of the spectrum."
10. "It was a queer, sultry summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I don't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers - goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves."
-----
If you were really bored/desperate, a clue would be to go digging through books I've read and blogged, because they would most likely be on the above list. Anyway guessing gogogo!
-----
1. "It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone, in the comfort of Mr Farraday's Ford; an expedition which, as I forsee it, will take me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country, and may keep me away from Darlington Hall for as much as five or six days."
2. "In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in The Times."
3. "My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother."
4. "The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms."
5. "The pubs, likesay, dead busy, full ay loco-locals and festival types, having a wee snort before heading off tae the next show. Some ay they looks okay... a bit heavy oan the hirays though, likesay."
6. "Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it."
"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potatoes way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze.""
7. "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January 1960; and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August 1974. Specialised readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, "Gender Identitiy in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites," published in the journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you've seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That's me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes."
8. "The train was late. Under the dim lamplight, the platform was cast in half shadow. As Meng left the train, a snowflake floated down and landed on his neck. The wind was blowing open his coat at the bottom. It produced a whistling sound which reminded him that the weather here in Tiancheng was colder than he'd expected. Bag in hand, he walked with the throng towards the station exit, and though he kept looking about him, he couldn't spot the Song Dynasty tower that he remembered. Besides the darkness and the lamplight, he saw nothing but the ungainly contours of the high-rises, which looked the same here as everywhere else. No doubt the buildings had blocked his view of the tower."
9. "Whenever I meet a man, I catch myself wondering what our child would look life if we were to make a baby. It's practically second nature to me now. Whether he's handsome or ugly, old or young, a picture of our child flashes across our mind. My hair is light brown and feathery fine, and if his is jet black and coarse, then I predict our child's hair will be the perfect texture and colour. Wouldn't it? I always start out imaging the best possible scenarios for these children, but before long I've conjured up horrific versions from the very opposite ends of the spectrum."
10. "It was a queer, sultry summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I don't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers - goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves."
-----
If you were really bored/desperate, a clue would be to go digging through books I've read and blogged, because they would most likely be on the above list. Anyway guessing gogogo!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)