Books Read: 2009
Submitted by ejones on Sat, 01/24/2009 - 05:22
Tags:
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
- Waiting for the Sun, by Barney Hoskyns
- Runaway, by Alice Munro
- Darkmans, by Nicola Barker
- The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano
- Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain
- In Parenthesis, by David Jones
- Like Hot Knives to the Brain: James Ellroy's Search for Himself, by Peter Wolfe
- Nineteen-seventy-seven, by David Peace
- Black Dahlia Avenger, by Steve Hodel
- Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, by Barney Hoskyns
- Across the Great Divide: The Band and America, by Barney Hoskyns
- The Duel, by Anton Chekhov (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Polokhonsky)
- Resurrection Men, by Ian Rankin
- The Score, by Richard Stark
- The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
- Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon
- Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon
- The Season, by William Goldman
- Blood's a Rover, by James Ellroy
- Nineteen-eighty, by David Peace
- Nineteen-eighty-three, by David Peace
I'd be interested to know what you're favourite books are. What's your top 5 (or 10? or more)
Off the top of my head...Gravity's Rainbow, One Hundred Years of Solitude, L.A. Confidential, The Chill (by Ross Macdonald), Midnight's Children, The Savage Detectives, Alice in Wonderland, Blood Meridian, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. What are yours?
Oops, never mind about the last query. I just glanced at your page and realized you'd already posted a list. Good to see Nabokov so high; I haven't crossed Lolita off my list yet, but I loved Pale Fire, and I've been working on Ada for the better part of this year. Interesting to see Updike on your list; I know he was a prolific novelist, but I mostly know his articles and reviews. What do you get from the Rabbit novels?
Sorry for the delay, forgot to check back here.
What I love best about the Rabbit novels is that the characters are so unremarkably common, almost painfully normal, that it’s so easy to relate to them at every moment in the book. This is not a book about a great man; rather a book about your own life or your neighbour. The fact that the main character is typical makes his exploits all the more shocking (his homicidal fantasies, his sexual escapades) and the dialogue is remarkable.
I admire the way the Rabbit novels deal with highly sensitive personal/social issues in a completely amoral, non-preachy way. People will have different takes on whether a character is good or bad depending on their own beliefs.
I also think that Updike is one of the greatest realistic writers I know of. It’s not uncommon for a simple walk around the block to take up 3-4 pages, detailing all the character is taking into their eyes, their thoughts, fantasies, memories; and all of it is calculated, not just random, but actually reinforcing what is going on inside the character.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Rabbit Run. Rabit Redux is not bad, but I much prefer the last two works, especially Rabbit at Rest. That was actually the first Updike book I read and it prompted me to get the rest of the Rabbit books.
I've been meaning to read Gravity's Rainbow, One Hundred Years of Solitude & Midnight's Children. I actually read a few pages of Rainbow, but the size of it intimidated me (hehe...Banana Breakfast).
The book tends to do that to people- I failed twice to get through it before reading it over the course of an undemanding summer job. When I raved about Midnight's Children to one of my college English professors, she remarked that she'd always wanted to read the book but with kids to care of couldn't really give over a whole evening to it. I think that's true you can't read books like that in small increments on commutes or lunch hours but need to give over a weekend or something (or in Gravity's Rainbow's case, a series of weekends) to finishing them.
I generally cannot reada book for longer than an hour or two a day, though on the rare occasion I'll put in 3-4 hours. Thus, reading a book usually takes me a few weeks to a couple months. Granted, I can read multiple books for close to 8 hours, but cannot read the same one.
When I get really into a book I don't mind how long it takes to finish it, but otherwise most of my really long reading sessions have been out of necessity as a student