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)

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And thus 2009 is almost finished hurtling towards its end.