Year in review 2008

Faithful reader E.G., whom I ran into on the street pretty much in front of the house, asks if in fact I have read anything since October. Well, yes. So, to get back on the horse, here we go:

books read last year: 210
minutes of exercise: 21,260 (took the last week-and-a-half of the year mostly off, so I missed my compulsive goal of an hour a day by 640 minutes, or a mere 1 min. 45 seconds per day).
Evidence that I am not alone in this comes from my gym, which has installed these crazy bikes that have courses you can race on and even a lame game where you ride through dragons. You can create a login and then track all of your progress (average mph, calories, distance ridden) and graph it against everyone who's registered, break down the data by age and sex, club, bike type, and region. So there--I am clearly not the only one. If they had something like GTA on there, except you had to pedal your car, I would be Lance Armstrong.

Actually, not--they give you the mph rating at which you're pedaling, and I've been up to about 27, but not for long (did 1 mile in 2:26, which works out to 24.65 mph). I think the guys on the Tour de France regularly pedal at like 30+, for hours. According to this, in 2005 Lance Armstrong averaged 25.82 mph over 86 hours, with a top speed of 35.54 mph (that's an average, too, which means he did this for more than an hour) for a 41.85-mile time trial. Dang. Still, it would kick butt if you could ride around and shoot things.  Since you have to, you know, stay on the course, that has cut down on my reading a bit. But it's more fun than I would have expected.

Anyway. Best however many of the year, in fiction:
Gruber, Tropic of Night--African shamans and folklore, taken seriously and exported to Miami, where they enrich the tropical stew. Reminds me of those paranormal George C. Chesbro mysteries I ate up as a teenager. Pretty dang literate, and suspenseful. His last book made it into trade pb, which is a nice step up.
Faust, Money Shot--the best hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn. Also the only hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn.
Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas--funny and compassionate, in an odd way: even his Nazis are compulsive writers who submit their work to endless contests, found minor journals no one reads, create weird personal mythologies that only other obsessives follow, and carry on with little compunction about their horrendous beliefs. Bought 2666 the day it came out and am stuck on p. 60 or so, but will get back in there slugging soon.
Gaiman, American Gods--mythology, confidence games, gods fighting, a prison novel, end-times prophecy: pretty much every genre there is mashed together, and it all works astonishingly well as a story; you don't just sit there and admire how well he mixes it all. A heck of a trick.
Park, Personal Days--or Ferris, And Then We Came to the End, both of which concern politics, office politics, and relationships, and how weird work is in general. Hard to separate what exactly happens in each, though Ferris's collective narrator captures something scarily essential about office culture
Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude--WWII fought out within the confines of an English rooming-house. Dry, hilarious, mean. Particularly recommended to Eoin.
O'Neill, Netherland--Gatsby as a post-9/11 West Indian named Chuck Ramakissoon, and cricket as a grand metaphor for about 15 things. Which reminded me that I know two people who are actually really interested in cricket, and who showed me cricket videos on YouTube.
Hemon, The Lazarus Project--history and the usual hilarious black-comic Balkan self-loathing, mixed in with photos and a reimagined story about an immigrant killed by Chicago's police chief for what may have been anarchism or just simple confusion. What Everything Is Illuminated should have been. (Reminds me of the people I got stuck next to on the flight back from NY--out-of-the-catalogue twentysomethings: he had the hobbit beard, sagged pants, chain wallet, hoodie, and she was reading, yes, Everything Is Illuminated. Couldn't tell if they were friends with benefits, just friends, a couple, or what. Ah, these young people.)
Gran, Dope--mean, twisty, bleak little female-centered noir set in 50s NYC. Lives up to the Jim Thompson comparisons by reviewers.
Bloom, Away--who knew she had it in her? After writing some great New Yorker fiction (not exactly an insult, but definitely a genre), Bloom here presents a brutal, unsentimentally funny, vivid take on Jewish NY in the 1920s, along with a semi-tall tale about a real-life woman who tried to walk to Siberia to get her child back. A powerhouse of a story, told with color and a drive I had no clue she could muster.

In nonfiction:

Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York--and boy, did they. I think I'm supposed to call this "delicious," which may presume a higher interest in antique society gossip than you or I possess. (Also makes me ponder the continued career of Louis Auchincloss, who seems to turn out a small, elegant, [and totally uninteresting to me] novel every year or so about latter-day NYC WASPs. I guess someone reads them--maybe the adult version of whoever reads Gossip Girl novels? I begged one from a student--"I won't be your enabler," she protested, before giving in to my whining--and my soul felt maimed afterward. I tried Twilight, too, but the first page was so horrid that I couldn't do it. Susan kinda liked all four, though, so your mileage may vary.)
Dalrymple, The Last Mughal--vivid, thoughtful, wonderful look at the 1857 mutiny through the eyes of actual Indians as well as Brits, with a full ration of savagery and imperial brutalism. Later, it turns out that someone we knew is a descendant of the Mughals and had read the book, which was awesome. She also loves (and even slightly prefers) his White Mughals, which I got about a quarter of the way through but will pick up again in deference to Priya.
Faust, This Republic of Suffering--about how the Civil War instituted an entire new regime dedicated to managing suffering, which relates not just to the world of emotions but to refrigeration, cemeteries, and pensions. A powerful and resonant book. Also, Dray, Capitol Men, about the impossibly courageous African-American politicians who made Barack Obama possible.
Mendelsohn, The Lost--another of those people I would be if I were way smarter. Mendelsohn traces the members of his family lost in the Holocaust while also considering the story of Genesis as a way of understanding why the world is and people exist in the first place. Paul R. suggested that he was probably sleeping with all of his translators, too. If so, more power to him.
Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire--calls the entire course of the Vietnam War, in about 1963. Also some amazing stuff about how hard the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses strove to get him silenced or pulled from the country.
Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure--or Mayer, The Dark Side; or Lichtblau, Bush's Law; or Filkins, The Forever War--at some point, I got tired of all the malfeasance (couldn't read the Cheney biog, though Lisa R-S recommended it), but before that, got as much chapter-and-verse as I needed. Filkins' take on the war rewrites Herr's Dispatches in ways that are chilling, immediate, and horrific; he really shoves your face in what it's like to be older and under fire and protected only by massively-armed 20-year-olds. It's not a good feeling.
Perlstein, Before the Storm--the definitive Barry Goldwater book, I'm sure, and one not weighed down by the overly large historical claims made in Nixonland, which I think is a little too much a politics-junkie's book: every story gets told (admittedly, some of them great, as when Jack Germond jokes that George Romney, Mitt's dad, is such a maladroit communicator that "the Governor later clarified" is a key on his typewriter), whether or not it ultimately mattered, and I think the result mistakes overheated rhetoric for real political commitments. What's now particularly interesting to me about the Goldwater book is what it will show in 10 years. If the republic actually elects President Palin (the Repubs, Perlstein points out at length in both books, were essentially written off by political scientists as a permanent minority party after LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964), then it's going to be really, really scarily relevant. I'm rooting for historical curiosity instead.
Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic--it really sucks to play pro football in a lot of ways, and the players grasp most of them. In a surprising way, a great book about a modern American workplace. Also mentions born-again kicker Jason Elam's Christian thriller Monday Night Jihad, which I saw at JFK airport and briefly considered reading. But I read Left Behind, and that was crap (though I am still rather a large fan of LB II the film; III sucked, even with Lou Gossett), and I'd rather someone with those politics not get my money. (Sounds more decent than you'd expect, though. From the PW review: "Rich details about life as an NFL player invigorate the story; the details become problematic when the story gets wordy (as in one long and unnecessary chapter toward the end of the book). Although the final [...] plot twist is too easy, unexpected humor helps leaven the serious themes, and the sparks of romance that fly between Riley and an American Muslim woman will pique readers' interest.")
Page, The City's End--several hundred years of fantasies of the end of NYC. Amazing a) how many people have wanted it destroyed b) how hopeful these visions can be for a new future. Introduced me to a fascinating WEB DuBois story about the racial possibilities of the city's end that I'd never known of. (Here's an interesting review in an SF mag.)
Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague--poor old EC comics, beaten down by the forces of, well, the usual. A great bit of comics history, enlivened in particular by interviews with those who did the burning as well as those who got burned. Plus that great bit from Gaines' congressional testimony:
            Mr. BEASER. There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?

            Mr. GAINES. Only within the bounds of good taste.

            Mr. BEASER. Your own good taste and salability?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes.

            Senator KEFAUVER. Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes, sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

            Senator KEFAUVER. You have blood coming out of her mouth.  

            Mr. GAINES. A little.

Comments

[Ben Casnocha]

Nice to hear your "voice."

Your reading and exercise habits impress and inspire as ever, not only in quantity but in eclecticness (is that a word?).

[Jesse Berrett]

Eclecticism, I think. Also, RIP DFW, which I will get to soon.