2014 Year in Review — The Books I Read
Each year, I find some funny people telling me that they read a certain book because it appeared on my year end reading review. That’s a pretty cool thing but also a bit of a responsibility. I hope, if you choose to read any of these books, that they find you as delighted and provoked as I mostly was.
In order from least favourite to most favourite, the books I read in 2014:
32. Ask The Dust by John Fante
Most of you who read this blog know me and most people who know me know that I am thrifty. A lot of the early portion of Ask the Dust centres around the main character, Arturo Bandini, a poor young man of many exclamations, getting his hands on some money and then frivolously spending his wad. This is not fun reading for me. Although I’ve gotta give the book credit for being so free wheeling and spontaneous. It was written in the 1930s and it reads more like a contemporary novel. It’s risky and dangerous writing that’s got a joyous spirit but come on Arturo, quit squandering your sheckles! He’s something of a neurotic, virginal Hamlet, unable to make the decision to cross the void into the world of sex. He has visions, so various that it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between what’s real and what is his imagined exaggerated reality. A woman enters his home and tries to have sex with him and she removes her clothes and he sees wounds and dead skin but is this just his deluded sexual neurosis or is it a real condition?
31. Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley
Very mannered and very accurate in its portrayal of the dark ugliness inside of men. Despite it’s accuracy, the first section is so ugly and recognizable that it’s pretty hard to read or enjoy. I put it down because I was feeling burnt out by reading and reading a book that feels like a struggle was not setting my soul on fire in a good way.
30. Locke and Key book Three by Joe Hill
Book Three of the series didn’t really move too far forward from where Book 2 had taken it. See my takes on the first two books below.
29. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
An inspiration to Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Winesburg, Ohio is considered one of the first books in Modernist Literature. It focuses more soundly on character than it does on plot and the structure is more of a pastiche than a novel. It is a series of portraits of people who live in the small town midwest, they’re hopes, struggles, fears. Some of the stories are better than others and its lack of forward momentum is tedious at times. I can certainly see how it informs the writing of Bradbury but that doesn’t mean it’s better than the writing of Bradbury.
28. What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
2014 was sort of my year of Malcolm Gladwell. I listened to each of his works as audio books. I can’t listen to fiction on headphones but I sure can listen to non-fiction. The episodic approach that What the Dog Saw takes, (it’s a collection of articles and essays) isn’t as effective as Gladwell’s other books (exhaustive studies on singular phenomenas). But there are some real gems in here, particularly Gladwell’s take on intellectual property via a playwright who ‘borrowed’ from the real life of a psychologist in the off-broadway hit Frozen. Too many of the stories remain too unfocussed to leave you with anything tangible and applicable to your own life.
27. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
The opening sequence is really a stunner, the casual making of a new bold friend, a beer or two turning into six, a whole night tumbling forth and unfolding, exotic new people and rich places and parties, and falling in love at first site. It’s got that bloody flavour of the best nights out on the street, following your gut and being really and truly free. It’s all very appealing to me. But the rest of the book falls into a sort of predictable vehicle for poetic turns of phrase and an inauthentic culmination that forces a conclusion for the sake of an ending. Just because a book has really good lines, doesn’t mean it’s really well-written.
26. Hell House by Richard Matheson
An interesting enough story if sewn up a little banally for my liking. I had one good scare but the rest was more descriptive than actually chilling. Matheson is also way too keen on the verb ‘started,’ as in, “Fischer started as Edith entered behind him.” I don’t think jump scares work that way in books. Just because a character starts, doesn’t mean the reader does too.
25. Just Kids by Patti Smith
Started off a bit masturbatory with Patti Smith droning on about how much they dedicated their lives to art and all they wanted to be was artists. She and Mapplethorpe reminded me of what we now deem hipsters, talking about their weird little installation art pieces they build in their apartments that no one really ever sees. But sooner or later, Smith and Mapplethorpe both made it. Their work was good and despite, for her, not really caring if it was seen (at least that’s how she portrays it, I get the feeling she’s not that reliable a narrator when it comes to self-reflection — probably the biggest problem of the book), they did become quite influential and successful in the world of art. As the book progresses it gets more interesting. I actually started to admire the devotion they had to their work and even envy them for the world that they lived in and moved amongst.
24. The Green Man by Kingsley Amis
A ghost story without too many scares, I felt a little let down right until the last few sentences. I felt a little bit like the main character went from being a terrible person to being redeemed without actually changing. He became someone different but we never actually saw a moment when he had to give something up. The way the story’s action builds is compelling but sometimes the pay-offs feel stunted (ie an orgy scene that Amis builds to beautifully — see the cover about — but once realized, peters out). Mostly I felt like the book just lacked being scary. But the the last few sentences are actually what made the book a satisfying read. The main character finds out that he, and people in general, can’t be perfect, they’re just stumbling towards ‘eternity’ trying and trying and trying. Even when it seems like he’s actually changed his life and his attitude toward his loved ones, he’ll probably just screw up again in the next few moments and be back to square one, just like he has with his constant promise to stop drinking. The scene with the Young Man is also pretty great.
23. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Listening to this on Audiobook didn’t work as well as Gladwell’s books. I think I could’ve gotten a lot more out of it if I’d read it on the page. That’s not to say there weren’t moments of extreme poignancy; crushing glimpses of what it is to lose a spouse. God, how sad the minutiae of death. Unfortunately, I got bogged down in the middle. The year itself kept jumping back and forth and it was much harder to follow listening to it than it would’ve been reading. It also felt like it lacked forward momentum. The story was always sitting at the same place until the very end. I know this is a harsh critique, to say Didion isn’t entertaining enough in her memoire of losing a husband, but the truth of the matter is, if you’re a professional at anything, you must answer to your audience, they’re the ones that pay you, they’re your boss. If I put on a play and don’t get paid, then I’d hope you cut me some slack on the quality. But if I put on a play and receive a wage for it, you’ve got every right to say publicly that the play was bad. All this is to over-defend my statement that The Year of Magical Thinking suffered from plotting issues.
22. Locke & Key Book One by Joe Hill
Joe Hill’s mechanisms for plot are sometimes forced and stiff but he says in his bio that the worst comic he ever read was still a really good time. I like that statement. More than anything, with a comic book you need to instill in your reader an absolute obsession with turning the page and finding out what happens next. Hill does a good job with that.
21. Locke and Key Book Two by Joe Hill
While still written clumsily, the story gets a little more creative, this time focusing on a key that opens up people’s minds. Once the mind is opened, someone can physically put in or take out anything they please. What are the repercussions of removing something like fear from a person’s psyche?
20. S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst
An intricate and revolving mystery wherein two university students leave notes back and forth to each other in the margins of a book written by a mysterious anonymous figure. You get both the margin notes and the novel that they’re writing in, as well as some loose artifacts (maps, notes on cocktail napkins etc) passed along through the book. Imagine the controversies around Shakespeare if no one named William Shakespeare ever existed at all, and if the suspects behind his identity had been accused of spying and murder — that’s the story within the book, and the note-leavers, while nursing romance, try to get to the bottom of who this author really was. The book is hard to put down but I think I read it wrong. To delineate time, the two students write to each other in several different colours. I read the novel first, then followed a color through at a time. Occasionally they’d mention things out of context and I couldn’t figure out how they’d come to their conclusions. Later, I realized that, unchronologically, they’d discovered information in later margin writings. Occasionally, this made for a confusing read. I was also primed up for a big twist ending, which I never really got. It was easy to lose steam while reading the margins as well, because you’d have to reread so much of what had come before to get context. If I could go back, I’d read it all at once in a big lump. I think that would be a lot more satisfying. The book has parallels on parallels on parallels.
19. Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
In both the David Markson books I read, the last few pages really pay off. Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a book that novelizes a philosophy. If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is. The premise is something you find out as you go, I could sort of synthesize it but it would make reading the book a lot less enjoyable. Essentially a woman sits at a table in a house and writes at a type writer. You’re reading what she writes. Sometimes she leaves her work for a few days but there are no chapter breaks, or breaks at all. Sometimes she lets you know when she’s been away, sometimes she doesn’t. To me, the book is about imagination. It’s about how thinking something is real can be just as powerful as the thing itself actually being real (like Wittgenstein’s theories). It suffers from some serious peddle-spinning in the middle but, like I said, really pays off in a thoughtful and poignant way in the last 16 pages.
18. The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
A fantastical journey very much in line with Alice in Wonderland. I was expecting this 1940's penned novel to be dry and naturalistic and it was anything but. There are lots of mind-bending philosophical explanations on creation questions like ‘why is the sky blue?’ (or why is the night black, more to the point). It’s another in a long line of ‘comic’ novels that aren’t actually very funny (Confederacy of Dunces, I’m looking at you), but it’s a short read and kept me interested with it’s strong poetic prose and quirky characters and action.
17. Fun Home by Claire Bechdel
Not only a great comic book, also a fantastic novel. It is an interspersing of cultural references and touchstones that affected and greatly influenced the author and her family’s lives — Fitzgerald, wind in the willows etc. It is very intellectual but in a loving and warm way.
16. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
I forgot to take any notes about this book after I completed it. However, half-way through my reading, I sent a text message with what I thought to one of my reading buddies, Jarrett Knowles. In that text (he was a big fan of the book) I wrote this: “Half way through The Corrections. Liking it so far. Am finding the jumps in time interesting; not sure if I like it or don’t like it/it’s well put together or haphazard. Wondering what character you found yourself identifying with most. It’s sometimes a little hard to identity and sometimes way too easy/scary. I think I’m identifying with Gary the most so far. Which is weird.”
15. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Some very interesting subversions of cliche. An evil foster mother who is actually full of love, a WWII story that centres around Germans instead of Jews, etc etc. An interesting excerpt from the book highlights, what I think, is one of the most important structural parts of the story:
“I have given you two events in advance, because I don’t have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.”
And it’s true, Zusak tells us what’s going to happen, essentially, in each Section heading. Often the narrator, Death, will communicate something that happens in the future, sometimes as important as the death of a main character, but what’s really important and interesting is not what we get but how we get there: ‘the machinations that wheel us there…”
14. Fathers: An Anthology edited by Andre Gerard
I’m writing a book about my dad and I began with some research on the subject of Patremoir (a term coined by this novel’s editor, Andre Gerard). As I read through the book, an anthology of short stories and essays by children about their fathers, I realized that the editor was from Vancouver. After a few emails, we met for coffee and he read and gave me feedback on a few of my own father stories. The anthology was a great read and a huge help to me, but not nearly as much as the editor. This is the go-to collection of literary communication by children to their dads.
13. Notes on Directing by Frank Hauser and Russell Reich
Simply a must read for anyone who wants to be a director. A hundred pages long, it’s all killer, no filler, made up of epigrams on things to look out for and consider when directing a play. A handbook that directors should have in their repertoire.
12. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
This one is about trusting your gut and how our first impressions can often be our best ideas. This is such an integral piece of knowledge for the art of acting, which relies on trusting your gut and acting upon your instincts.
11. A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews
There are a lot of great things about this book so let’s start with the thing that bugged me. Toews stays locked into her protagonist, Nomi Nickle, for the entire novel. She never leaves her voice and thus all of the dialogue in the book looks like her telling us what people said instead of representing how conversations happened. It’s all past tense, recall of conversations. For some people this might not be a big deal but, for me, I always end up transposing each description of conversation into dialogue. I try to just leave it as it reads because that’s obviously how Toews has intended her words, but I just can’t lock into what they’re saying unless I ‘hear’ it out loud. Does anyone else have this problem? The best thing about this book is how well it captures the feelings of teen angst. It brings it into our adult mindset and weaves a sad story of boredom, incredible loss, and enriching pathos. The action of the book happens with no sentiment whatsoever. Some terrible, dreadful thing that we fear from the beginning of the book happens without any build and Nomi just as quickly moves forward to the next thing. Every event for us, because every event for Nomi, is a dull blur of growing up.
10. For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway does a remarkable job of making you like Robert Jordan and his band of Spanish comrades. He also does an excellent job of synthesizing how human thought works, we get poetic little spats of Robert Jordan arguing with himself the same way we do when we’re in the shower after a difference of opinion. But Jordan’s thoughts have much higher stakes despite their banality.
9. The Beautiful West and the Beloved of God by Michael Springate
I got myself into a playwright’s colony put on by Playwright’s Theatre Centre this year. My dramaturg (kind of like an editor for a play) was a man named Michael Springate. We got along quite well and he invited me to the reading of his novel during the colony. I enjoyed the reading and picked up a copy and read it quickly. It’s a politically and morally potent book that doubles as a thrilling page turner. It concerns a young Palestinian man in Montreal, his new girlfriend from the Canadian Prairies and a few other morally stressed-out characters. In a believable entanglement, Mafouz, the young Palestinian, travels to Egypt on behalf of his father to explore a business proposition from his Uncle. What follows is a travesty of errors that exposes the hypocrisy, cruelty, and triviality of political torture in the name of confession. Springate writes as he speaks, thoughtfully, patiently, and poignantly. I definitely recommend picking this one up.
8. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
The Sisters Brothers feels like a fable influenced by Heart of Darkness, written with a pulp fiction flare targeting the Western genre. It was a perfect read for me when I picked it up, just as I was carving out my character in Barkerville, who hailed from the barely post-peak San Francisco gold rush. A book that does not go where you expect it to, the bottom sort of falls out of the ending, but it’s still a really satisfying read.
7. Vanishing Point by David Markson
A grouping of interesting anecdotal epigrams about some of the great artists in human history. There are small glimpses of the Author setting about the organization and collection of these anecdotes. And as we read we wonder what his purpose is, how he’s grouping them, how he categorizes them, and, ultimately, what he’s trying to say. In the last ten pages we realize that the author is getting old, the author is dying, and what he’s expressing is something poignant and elusive about living life, about creating, about feuding and critiquing, about dying and about living. It doesn’t matter what you do or how much you accomplice, age catches us all.
6. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
I really enjoyed the fluid shifting of focus between the characters’ inner worlds. Woolf makes her characters think like real people, sometimes juggling multiple thoughts at once, grammatically unstable. In one section, Mrs. Ramsay is reading her son James “the old man and the sea,” while thinking about a tenant girl’s courtship by a simple boy, while pondering how unfair life is as you grow up and how she wishes her children could stay children forever, while keeping track of the finances for the greenhouse, while thinking of the courted girl’s parents and what they’ll think about their daughter finding a man, while concerning herself with another son catching crabs and falling into the sea. Yet, if we’re paying attention, it is all quite clear to us what Woolf is talking about.
We bounce to and fro amongst the thoughts of so many characters and truly feel a part of their lives. Yet, to my recollection, we never get a glimpse into Mr. Ramsay’s world. He becomes a closed book, a legend, a locked door, just like fathers often seem to be (incidentally, this book was recommended to me by my editor friend from earlier in this list. His latest project is an in-depth analysis of the cultural allusions in To the Lighthouse).
And near the end, the artifice of the novel tears off in the wind. The characters are not aware that they are characters, it’s not metafiction, but we suddenly feel tender towards them and their impending finish. In the second to last chapter, a line tells us that Mr. Ramsay is “reading very quickly, as if he were eager to get to the end,” just as we are eager to get to the end. The final line is about a painter, Lily Briscoe, finally achieving her vision with a simple and solitairy line, running down a painting she’s been working on for years. And like that, the lights go out on the world Woolf has invited us into.
5. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
(note: this entire write-up, including the ‘google returns’ was prepared in January of 2014) Gladwell regularly teaches us things we don’t know we need to know. Marketing is more than just something required by business reps and advertisers. We all need to know how to market ourselves, particularly in the modern age where your identity is your brand whether you’re an actor, a construction worker, or a teacher. Gladwell lays out the people who are important for us to reach with our messages in order to transmit the information we feel is important to the widest audience possible. I particularly like his lessons on contagion, how a yawn, even just by using the word, can be spread amongst a group of people. We see this in the theatre with laughing and with sorrow. If your audience is empty though, then there are less people to catch on to the emotional or intellectual contagion that you are trying to spread. I look at a show like PI’s Terminus, one of my favourite shows of 2012. It’s houses were very modest despite great feedback from the people who saw it. Compare this to Electric Company’s All The Way Home, a similiarly great show. Despite having a comparable starting audience to Terminus, as word of mouth mounted, All The Way Home sold out it’s entire run and the capabilities of doing another sold out a remount (never staged) two years later. Terminus and All The Way Home were both great shows. But perhaps, there was something about their initial audiences that differed. Terminus’ word of mouth never fully worked. All the Way Home’s did. When you search “Electric Company Theatre” on tumblr, you get pages and pages of posts. Most of them are pictures of Jonathon Young, many of them from a blog called ‘hellyajonathonyoung’. When you search PI Theatre or Pink Ink Theatre you, literally, get no return having to do with Vancouver Theatre. According to Gladwell’s book, the difference between the houses in the two shows seems to be a fundamental difference between who was in the audience. Electric Company caters to mavens and connectors, people who are ‘on the grid,’ ‘plugged in,’ and setting trends. PI theatre’s audience seems to be more made up of people who were already connected with the inner circle of theatre — culprits of a ‘you see my show, I’ll see your show’ attitude. In other words, people who are saving their word of mouth ammunition for their non-theatre friends for their own upcoming shows. I didn’t recommend Terminus to any of my non-theatre friends, not because I don’t think they’d like it, but because I need to save those few invitations that will actually engage my non-theatre friends for my own shows. I doubt the proprietor of ‘Hellyajonathonyoung’ has the same reservations.
Another google search, for the reviews of the two shows, returns evidence that further backs the point. Terminus front page retrieves reviews from, in order: Review Vancouver, Plank Magazine, Plank magazine again, a Press Plus One review of a 2011 Pi show, The Charlebois post, Vancouverplays.com, a Georgia Straight contest to win tickets, a wordpress site, and finally — and most influentially on the first page — the Vancouver Courier. The Georgia Straight’s review — Vancouver’s most influential arts paper — doesn’t appear til the second page of google. All the Way Home’s first page includes in order: Vancouverscape.com, The Globe and Mail, Georgia Straight, Gay Vancouver, Laura Murray PR, and finishes with a video trailer at the bottom of the page. No offense to any of the review sites on the Terminus google search but they’re in a whole different class than papers like the Globe and Mail. I’m not sure how a company could alter these results but I do know that paying attention to new reviewers in town like Cecilia Lu, who writes for Vancity Buzz, could be very very important for the future of independent theatre in Vancouver.
4. The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
I don’t know if this is a good book. It’s certainly well-researched and it’s certainly well-planned. But sometimes the story is downright stupid and the structure of the whole is kind of a mess. But, man, it’s actually still affecting me. I’m now way more into the abstract thinking of conspiracy theories, not the paranoid theories themselves, but the outside-the-box logical practice of approaching thought from scratch instead of based on established constructs. It’s broken into three novels and the prose itself is very alluring:
Book 1. The Eye in the Pyramid
From Wikipedia, on the religion that was formed in the wake of The Illuminatus Trilogy: “There is some division as to whether it should be regarded as a parody religion, and if so to what degree. Discordians use subversive humor to spread their philosophy and to prevent their beliefs from becoming dogmatic. It is difficult to estimate the number of Discordians because they are not required to hold Discordianism as their only belief system, and because there is an encouragement to form schisms and cabals.”
Book 2. The Golden Apple
The plot of the Illuminatus trilogy is so intricate and well planned that it almost feels like it has to be real. If it wasn’t so off the deep end ridiculous, I’d probably believe it’s spiderweb-lined conspiracy theories that run as deep as Atlantis, the Pentagon, and Nazi zombies. One of my favourite theories the book espouses is that, essentially, order can never occur in our world because humans are so against anyone telling them what to do that they self-consciously sabotage any true order. And this is just one tiny idea embedded within this tome of ideas and theories, all drowned in a ridiculous fiction, it’s hard to believe that the book wasn’t written by the Illuminati themselves, who may actually be the Discordians, sending conspiracy theorists on a completely different scent entirely. My head hurts but I love these books. They manage to interweave the story to include the universes of Lord of the Rings, HP Lovecraft, Conan the Barbarian, JFK’s assassination and just about anything else you can think of.
Book 3. Leviathan
By the time you get to the third book, things are feeling more than a little lopsided. The climax happens with a lot of book left and it spins its wheels in post modern glom for some time. Altogether though, the Illuminatus Trilogy will stay with me for some time, stirring anew the unknowable layers and folds, double agents and double-double agents of a great story of ideas.
3. David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
David and Goliath is about how perceived disadvantages can actually be more helpful than handicapping. I loved this book. It teaches you how to keep positive in the face of failure and how to persevere. I think that cultural analysis is a more effective self-help than any self-help guru can ever be. Self-help books partially work through the culture of personality, non-fiction is frequently a culture of data which has its basis in facts instead of personal power. If you can learn to embrace tenacity and avoid bitterness based on facts rather than self-esteem, well, I think that’s probably a pretty good thing.
2. All The Pretty Horses by Cormac Mccarthy
I really almost gave up on this book right at the beginning. I’ve started and stopped Blood Meridian twice now because I found Cormac Mcarthy’s lack of quotation marks and confusing pronouns frustrating. Stupid, me. I stuck with this book because it was the only one I had left in Barkerville and I’m sure glad I did. The prose is totally beautiful and I actually went back to the first few sections and reread them for their beauty. Once I had the narrative clarified, the opening was stunning instead of maddening. And when John Grady Cole finally gets on the road down to Mexico, it’s very hard to put the book down.
1. The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer is not an author who remains a passive observant in his books, so half way through, I had to wonder, what his stance on the issue of capital punishment was. Gary Gilmore, in the first half is presented as a cheap punk. In the second half, once the media over his story begins, he is depicted as a cold, analytical, criminal genius. In the second half, producer Larry Schiller becomes a key figure in the novel. He’s also a key figure in the construction of the novel, since it is he who buys up the rites from each of the major characters and collects the information that Mailer uses to put the first half of the novel together. It makes for a fascinating exploration into the the legal matters behind telling someone’s life story, inside of the book that actually tells that figure’s life story. You see how Schiller gathered the letters that you read earlier in the book. It goes into detail of how Schiller gets the money together to purchase the rights over another producer looking to get involved. In order to do all this work, Schiller needs to be a better lawyer than the actual lawyers involved in the case. And there are a lot of them. There are lawyers representing the rights of Gary Gilmore, another for his mother and family, another for the victims of the murders, another for the position of the prison, plus the ACLU, the NAACP. and the attorney-generals themselves. And these lawyers find themselves on incredibly interesting sides of the battle, Gary’s lawyer end up fighting for the execution of their client, while the human right’s groups battle to save him.
It’s amazing how, by the end of the book, a person opposed to the death penalty (ie me) — can find themself cheering for the lawyers’ fight to kill a man. What a display of the excitement of jurisprudence.
It was interesting reading a novel that contains a fair point of view from the old white men in charge: a fair accounting of the deep feelings and beliefs from all sides of the question, including the condemned man himself.
Mailer reveals fairly each detail and, by the end, despite cheering for the lawyers to win their legal battles over whether the execution is lawful, I still held my belief that capital punishment is wrong. And, even stronger, I no longer felt as though capital punishment was wrong by my own opinion but patently, universally wrong. Larry Schiller sums the feeling up very well with his sentiments as he leaves the execution site: “What have we accomplished? There aren’t going to be less murders.” It’s the only line I highlighted in the whole book.
