On Reading 100 Books, Part II

Another year over, and once again I failed miserably at reading 100 books.

But I did succeed in garnering the silent judgement of cats everywhere.
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All right, maybe “failed” is a strong word. I ended up reading 70 books and that’s nothing to scoff at, right? Scornful sideways glances from feral felines aside, I decided to highlight five of my favorite books and three of my least favorite books of 2015. If it tickles your fancy, you can look at the whole list on the next page.

The Five I Liked the Most:

Love is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977 by Charles Bukowski
I learned about this book of poetry by way of The Limousines’ song of the same name. This was my first foray into the writings of Bukowski and it didn’t disappoint. With lines like “I have gotten so used to melancholia / that / I greet it like an old / friend.” and “I am going / to die alone / just the way I live,” this certainly isn’t Lord Byron or John Keats.  This is the kind of stuff you read after a breakup, right before rushing out to do it all over again. These are a few of my favorite lines from the poem Chopin Bukowski:

people need me. I fill
them. if they can’t see me
for a while they get desperate, they get
sick.

but if I see them too often
I get sick. it’s hard to feed
without getting fed.

You by Caroline Kepnes
Stephen King—of whom I officially became a fan in 2015 thanks to It and Four Past Midnight—called this book “hypnotic and scary.” What more of an endorsement do you need? You illustrates how easy it is to stalk a person in the digital age. It’s an eerie, well-written page-turner that’s left me eagerly awaiting the sequel, Hidden Bodies, due out in February.

Mosquitoland by David Arnold
It’s very seldom that a book bring me to tears (in a good way), but this YA debut did just that. The premise—a teenager has to return to her home town via Greyhound when she learns her mother is unwell—was what interested me in this book. Whether in real life or in fiction, I love a good road trip. Just like the tumultuous teenage years, Mosquitoland is equal parts happy and sad. It’s now one of my favorite YA novels of all time.

Sea of Trees by Robert James Russell
I came across Aokigahara—a dense forest at the bottom of Mt Fuji and a popular place where people go to commit suicide—while reading one of my favorite websites. Doing a simple Google search for more information on the location led me to this novella. It’s a quick, creepy mystery about a couple searching Aokigahara for the woman’s lost sister. What’s even creepier is that two movies have been made about this forest, one starring Matthew McConaughey released in 2015 and one starring Natalie Dormer that came out just last week. The creepiest bit, though, is that this is a real place. Check out this great documentary short put out by Vice for more on the Suicide Forest.

Poorly Drawn Lines: Good Ideas and Amazing Stories by Reza Farazmand
This book actually came in for someone else, but I saw it and ordered it for myself. It’s hilarious, nonsensical and was a welcome break from the previous book I’d read, The Price of Salt, which was neither hilarious nor nonsensical. Visit the website of the same name for more giggles.

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The Three I Liked the Least:

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
I went into this book with almost zero expectations. I’ve experienced first-hand how disappointing a decades-later followup can be (I’m looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Part of the charm of To Kill a Mockingbird was the way that Lee wrote Scout. Everything that happens is seen through a rose-colored, knee-high lens of childhood. That’s not the case with Watchman. Scout is twenty-six and has returned to Maycomb to visit Atticus. Events transpire that make her question the truths she clung to during childhood. The readers question these truths right along with her and I normally love a good existential rumination, but it’s handled in such a bland and forgettable way here. And that’s not even mentioning how certain characters are almost unrecognizable (ethically speaking) from their Mockingbird counterparts or how the death of a beloved character from Lee’s first novel is only eluded to rather than shown. How this ended up on Goodreads’ Best of 2015 list is baffling, especially when almost every patron I talked with about it also didn’t like it. I don’t want to waste anymore digital ink complaining about it, so I’ll just echo Philip Hensher‘s comments:  it’s “a pretty bad novel.”

Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig
Unlike Go Set a Watchman, I had at least one expectation for this book–that it would prepare me for the galactic landscape after the fall of the Empire. Sadly, this book did little to elucidate the mystery of what happens between the end of Return of the Jedi and the beginning of The Force Awakens. The plot takes its time getting started and by the time it does, I wasn’t nearly as invested in the characters as I should have been. These weren’t familiar characters like Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, so I didn’t particularly care what happened to them. Not to mention the new characters all came across as annoyingly self-assured. Because of this, I felt like there were no real stakes in book at all. But maybe that’s on me; it’s been a long time since I’ve read supplemental Star Wars material. There is one scene of Han Solo and Chewbacca aboard the Millennium Falcon, but as a whole, the book skews toward poorly-written fanfiction. In the plus column, I’ve got to give credit to Wendig for introducing the first gay hero in the form of ex-Imperial soldier Sinjir Rath Velus as well as a lesbian couple. In a universe where there are literally hundreds of different alien species, Star Wars has never been that concerned about diversity … but that’s a blog post for another day.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
This is up there (or down there) with The Train from Pittsburgh as one of my least favorite, most hated, severely unenjoyable reads of 2015. The actual plot of this book–an all-American family is torn apart after their daughter blows up a convenience store at the height of the Vietnam War, with musings of the rise and fall of the American Dream sprinkled in–could be boiled down to probably fifty pages. The other 350 pages of Roth’s novel are made up of tangential ramblings including, but not limited to, the history of Newark, the minutiae of Miss America contests and more information on glove-making than any human ever needs to know. It was frustrating for me to read through these prolonged chapters filled with walls of text and just when I thought that there was no point to be made–that maybe I’d picked up a New Jersey history book by mistake–and I was about to give up, Roth would wrap up his tangent and continue with the narrative. In It, Stephen King was similarly long-winded while detailing of the history of the fictional town of Derry, but King held my interest far more than Roth did in describing a place that’s only a six -hour drive away. Again, I have no one to blame but myself–I only read this because first-time director Ewan McGregor filmed the adaptation here, but getting through this book was such an ordeal that I’m now in no hurry to see the movie, despite my well-documented love for Pittsburgh on film.

Did you set or reach any reading goals in 2015? Do you have any reading goals for 2016 or any tips on how I can finally get to 100? Sound off in the comments below!

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Tony and Susan’s Nocturnal Animals

How do you choose your next book? Do you read reviews on Goodreads? Ask coworkers what they like? Ask friends what they hate?

Oftentimes, I’ll read about a movie going into production and see it’s based on a book and say to myself, “Hey, self, that’s two of our favorite things. Maybe we should read the book before the movie comes out. Also, are we going on a cleanse this weekend? We’re starting to look a little bloated.”

Even if you look as spiffy as this guy, don’t talk to yourself. It’s super-annoying for everyone else around you.

That’s how I found out about a new movie from Tom Ford set to star Jake Gyllenhaal (who I’ve gushed about before) and Amy Adams (hot off her Golden Globe win for Best Actress in Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes) called Nocturnal Animals. The movie, scheduled to begin filming in October, is an adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan.

Fifteen years ago, Susan left her husband, Edward. Now it’s 1993 and Susan is living comfortably as the wife of a doctor. One day a package from Edward arrives for Susan. It’s his first manuscript and he wants her opinion; she’s always been his best critic. On the day after Christmas, she begins reading Edward’s story, titled Nocturnal Animals. Susan is instantly absorbed into Tony’s world and finishes it in three sittings. The story within Wright’s novel follows Tony Hastings, a mathematics professor en route to Maine with his wife and daughter for vacation. Along the way, things take a dark and sinister turn that will change the lives of the Hastings forever.

The story-within-a-story format is nothing new (see: The Odyssey and One Thousand and One Nights), but I was just as riveted as Susan in my own reading. That might be because I started reading it the day before I was set to return from my own vacation. As I read about Tony and his family, I began wondering what evils were waiting for me on the darkly-lit interstates on the way back to Pittsburgh. Fortunately, my merry band of travelers and I only encountered the delirium associated with driving for seventeen-ish hours with infrequent breaks.

Susan feels an “uncomfortable undertow” as she reads. “It nudges a certain alarm in her, a fear whose object she does not know but which seems different from the fear in the story itself, something rather in herself.” She wonders what (if anything) Edward is trying to say with his book. She begins to reexamine her own life but resolves not to waver in it.

She thinks, “There are things in life the reading of no mere book can change.”

Oh, how wrong she is.

While the novel is wonderful at illustrating what happens when we think about our pasts—how we are prone to rewrite our own histories as we’re remembering them, painting things in different shades depending on our moods at the moment of remembering—what it really excels at is how it feels to get wrapped up in a book, how “print fastens ephemeral words to the page.” There are several great sentences that convey the terrible pleasure of a good page-turner, which is exactly what Tony and Susan is.

“She feels bruised by her reading and by life too. She wonders, does she always fight her books before yielding to them?”

Susan goes to the bathroom not out of necessity, but as a deliberate interruption when the suspense is too much.  When the phone rings, it’s described as brutally invading her reading.

“She puts the manuscript down. It’s time to stop for the night, though it seems murderous to quit now. Another painful interruption like divorce, required by the discrepancy between the laws of reading and the laws of life. You can’t read all night, not if you have responsibilities like Susan.”

I, like Susan, have felt the struggle of promising myself just one more chapter. She contemplates Tony’s problems and compares them to hers before realizing that Tony’s are simpler because they are not real.

“She’s caught by the strangeness of what she’s doing, reading a made-up story. Putting herself into a special state, like a trance, while someone else (Edward) pretends certain imaginings are real.”

But aren’t books real for us as we’re reading them? Does the fact that it’s fiction make it any less real in our minds? We go on the journey with the characters and if they’re changed by the book’s end, then chances are we are as well. Who amongst us hasn’t had a moment of silence when finally reaching a book’s end?

“The book ends. Susan has watched it dwindle before her eyes, down through final chapter, page, paragraph, word. Nothing remains and it dies. She is free now to reread or look back at parts, but the book is dead and will never be the same again. In its place, whistling through the gap it left, a blast of wind like liberty. Real life, coming back to get her. She needs a silence before returning to herself. Absolute stillness, no thought, no interpretation or criticism, just a memorial silence for the reading life that has ended. … There’s a shock of terror in the return of real life, concealed by her reading, waiting to swoop down on her like a predator in the trees.”

Honestly, that’s the most apt description of finishing a book I’ve ever read.

There’s an odd undercurrent of civility versus male bravado that runs throughout the novel; mild-mannered intelligence measured against that old alpha male persona. Susan also thinks about civility as she reads; she believes it’s her ability to read that keeps her civilized. Tony, too, is constantly described as objectively good and civil.

“[Tony] felt a kinship with cowboys and baseball players. He had never ridden a horse and had not played baseball since childhood, and he was not very big and strong, but he wore a black mustache and considered himself easygoing.”

Despite that kinship and his mustache, he’s portrayed as less manly, which is odd considering it’s a popular trope to believe that a mustache is the ultimate form of manliness.

This is the first image that comes up when you search Google Images for “manliness”. Spoiler alert: they all have mustaches. Picture taken from http://www.artofmanliness.com

As for the impending adaptation, I’m hoping it’s better than 2012’s The Words, which had a similar but different premise. If Ford can capture a brutality akin to 2013’s Prisoners for the parts of the film that feature Tony Hasting’s life and juxtapose that with something seemingly idyllic like 2009’s Chloe (the beginning, at least) for Susan’s life, I’d be a happy camper.

While we wait for the movie, which could be at least a year before it lands in theaters, why not read the book? I’ve heard a rumor that Summer Reading is in full swing at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

–Ross