Sundog Rising!
Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog
Reading, 2013
Year end top ten lists! Or fifteen, whatever. One of the ultimate self-indulgences, with little or no meaning outside of your own experience! Of course I take part.
What does it mean really, to say here’s my Top Fifteen Reading List for 2013? Did I read all the books published in 2013? I’m not certain I read any book published in 2013. What I did do was read 114 books in 2013, drawn from a variety of years — centuries even — and genres, in a grouping unique to my experience. Did anyone else read the exact same 114 books in 2013 that I did? I seriously doubt it.
So when I give you my general opinions on how good a read was or wasn’t concerning this specific list of 114 books, really the only standard these statements can be held against is the list itself, which no one else experienced. Qualitatively, these ratings are meaningless outside of my personal reading. But nevertheless, you as a different reader may or may not take away some recommendations of what to dabble in, given my reactions. Let’s dive into the befuddling waters.
Just at the end of the year, I read Talking About Detective Fiction, by P.D. James, a non-fiction treatise on the art of writing mysteries. She states that setting, characterization, narrative and structure are necessary to any good novel, mystery or otherwise; and “all four must be held in creative tension and the whole story written in compelling language”. As fine a definition of a successful book as any I’ve read. So let’s see where the four novels I actually finished reading in 2013 but wished I hadn’t fell short against these criteria. Here’s my four worst reads of the year. In no particular order.
The Four Fingers of Death, by Rick Moody. It could have been so good! It should have been so good! A four fingered bodiless hand crawling out of the desert to cause havoc … But it was just … sad. Characterization was strained, and the book was too overwritten to maintain creative tension.
Red Shirts, by John Scalzi. Such a great joke! Characters wearing red uniforms on a starship not unlike the Enterprise begin recognizing they’re always the ones who die on away missions, while the insanely reckless central characters live on. Ruined by a wandering, formless structure, bad dialogue and no creative tension.
Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. You ever find yourself trapped in a ridiculously long novel by the compulsion that it just has to come together at some point? And then it doesn’t? So you claim it was a good book anyway, because you devoted so much damn time to it. Not this one! Misogynistic characters, wandering plot, and again no creative tension. You know exactly what happens at the end two hundred pages before you get there. On the plus side, I have read other novels by Neal Stephenson that I did enjoy very much. This just wasn’t one of them. But I admire his research — you have to, he hits you over the head with it — and especially his description of the Philippines. Very real to life. Unlike his portrayal of General MacArthur, which barely rises to the status of political cartoon and jars unforgivably against his genuine portrayal of the islands.
A Dry Spell, by Susie Moloney. Good premise and setting, a failure in structure and overwritten practically into somnolence. At one point, something like six pages is devoted to someone dropping a card, someone else picking it up, and someone else seeing the second person pick it up. This is supposed to be a horror novel! Pick up the pace, and give us a major event half way through to keep us hooked, creative writing 101!
Okay, now that I’ve got that out of my system …
I had five picks on my best of list for Nonfiction in 2013. Again, in no particular order …
Josephine: The Hungry Heart, by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase. I’ve been a big Josephine Baker fan ever since I discovered her in high school, thanks to a song by the original line up of the band Sailor. Her story and life were amazing, and this book also captures the spirit of an era I was particularly interested in during 2013.
Art and Physics, by David Schlain. I read a couple of books by this writer, lent to me by my brother-in-law Brian. This one struck the deepest chord, although I don’t think it finishes as well as it develops through the first two thirds. Linking how two disparate sections of society view the history of science, with, surprisingly enough, the artist often anticipating where the scientist will go next.
The Hare With The Amber Eyes, by Edward DeWaal. A fascinating social and cultural history, all tied together by a collection of tiny Japanese figurines.
American Eve, by Paula Uruburu. The story of the Gibson Girl, Evelyn Nesbit. A worthy companion to the book on Josephine, with, surprisingly, even more drama.
Coco Chanel, by Justine Picardie. Another amazing woman, this one blazing her own path through society and culture to leave an immortal name. And another artist who got the job done, to my eternal admiration.
And finally, my top fifteen favourite fiction reads in 2013. From Number Fifteen through to the top book of the year. For me, anyway.
Number Fifteen: The Buddha of Brewer Street, by Michael Dobbs. Sometimes it takes me awhile to get around to an author everyone else has been reading for years. I read a few of Dobbs’s books this year, and liked this one the best. What happens when the search for the next Dalai Lama begins.
Number Fourteen: A Certain Justice, by P.D. James. There is such a rich panorama of writers in our culture to draw from! I find it an absolute treat that you can wait until you know it’s the right time to read someone, before really settling down to enjoy them. I’d read a couple of James books before certainly, but something tipped me off that this was the year to read P.D. James. Don’t have a clue what, but I’m glad the instinct registered. So I plowed through the first ten Adam Dalgleish novels between June and December. I was surprised by the range and variety of the pieces of the ongoing saga. This one, set in the world of lawyers and with an ending that doesn’t entirely conform to expectations, particularly stood out for me.
Number Thirteen: Poor Things, by Alasdair Grey. It’s always satisfying when I go looking for a pronouncedly strange novel, and the Library actually has it. A tour-de-force ramble on the Frankenstein theme, complete with the author’s own illustrations.
Number Twelve: Little Green Men, by Christopher Buckley. A wonderful follow up to my extensive research and theorizing on the phenomenon for 2012’s blog. I don’t know about the rest of his audience, but I find the story utterly convincing. There are so few genuinely good humour writers out there, too.
Number Eleven: Echo, by Jack McDevitt. My favourite of the current science fiction authors still worth reading. Rich characterization, and well structured plot development, to refer back to P.D. James for a moment. Which isn’t such a stretch, since McDevitt’s books are essentially mysteries with a futuristic Holmes/Watson team solving the enigmas we can only hope to aspire to at this moment in time.
Number Ten: Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. I started reading Murakami in 2011, with Kafka on the Shore, and he took my number one spot on this list last year with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. On a roll, I read another six of his novels this year. This one, his most notorious? sensational? biggest hit? — so popular in Japan he fled the country because of its success for awhile — I didn’t really expect to like. I was right. I loved it.
Number Nine: One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, by Jasper Fforde. The sixth in the Thursday Next series. It is mind boggling to me how many concepts this man can fit on a single page. And having a certain preference for metafiction myself these days, it’s no surprise I find Fforde a kindred spirit. Or is that ffind?
Number Eight: Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha, by Kim Newman. As Dracula was the first of the books I declared really great in my life — back when I was about five — I have naturally been somewhat obsessed with the vampire industry growing up around the Count in so many cultures since the nineteen-sixties, and beyond. What a delight to find an author even more obsessed than me. Half the fun reading these books for the dedicated fan such as myself is catching the references before they have to be explained to you. But I was overwhelmed to discover the title refers to a genuine song that I could download from I-Tunes!
Number Seven: The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. A lady what still gets it. See my blog entry for November 27th, 2013.
Number Six: Shroud for a Nightingale, by P.D. James. The Adam Dalgleish novel that resonates with me the strongest so far. The reason? She captures the character and world of the nurses so powerfully, I am in a total state of belief from the first chapter. A writer making fiction more than real. The mystery was a bonus.
Number Five: Dr. Thorne, by Anthony Trollope. Someone else I had to wait until the right time to read. Now I read a book by him every three months. I suspect his bibliography may outlive me. And I have to say 2013 was officially the year I decided I like Trollope better than Dickens. If you haven’t read Trollope, you may be in for a wonderful surprise …
Number Four: Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron, by Kim Newman. Yes, two books in the same series by the same author scoring high! My son gave me this one for Christmas last year, and I couldn’t believe how well the man nailed it. Or staked it. Either way, the Germans sending giant vampire bat/werewolf changelings into the air to dogfight during World War One is an inspired addition to the entire mythos.
Number Three: Embassytown, by China Mieville. The top three this year up the exercise to a different level. Mieville can be a supremely cerebral author in his conceptualizations, and the world and culture he gives us in this book are astounding. I was e-mailing my son discussing the concepts in this book for weeks. A young human girl becomes, physically, a metaphor in an alien race’s language. After that, things get strange …
Number Two: Summertime, All The Cats Are Bored, by Phillipe Georget. Gilles Sebag, you the man! See my entry for September 18th, 2013, debuting this blog.
Number One: The same author taking the top spot two years straight, 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami. Remember what I said about claiming you like a long book because it took you so long to read it? At 1,157 pages, 1Q84 might justifiably be considered too much of a good thing. But when I hit page 600 and realized I couldn’t put the book down, I knew I had a winner. Synthesizes many of the themes of his other novels into one magnum opus. And kudos to the translators. The novel was published as three separate novels in Japanese, and two different writers, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, made them work as one mammoth achievement in English. An amazing job.
2013 was a great year for reading.
Now I have to ask the question: does anything I just wrote offend anyone? Does slamming some novels that might have really worked for you and exalting others that you can’t see the point of at all hit you at your deepest level of being? Because that’s the first new topic I’m tackling in 2014.
As I Am Entertained, Therefore I Am.
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REALITY FICTION UPDATE!
And what is Reality Fiction, you may well ask?
Simple. The concept of the Reality Television Series translated to the printed page. 40 characters from my backlog of generally unpublished material are gathered together to compete in a different theme each Episode, with one or two characters being eliminated each sequence until there are only two left to fight it out in the final. The winner gets a short novel of their own as the grand prize.
But somehow, things always seem to go horribly wrong ...
What’s happening now?
In the three weeks since this blog last appeared, there’s been developments aplenty! Despite not “getting” Poetry, the bulk of the Contestants comported themselves well in Episode Seventeen, and then moved happily on to Melodrama in Episode Eighteen, an event rife with startling revelations! With consequences in our remaining characters’ development that will resonate throughout the rest of the book beyond that Episode. And now? What’s on deck? Alien Abduction! Reality Fiction Too! Asserting a new Oddness for 2014!
Continuing Friday at: realficone.blogspot.ca
REALITY FICTION TOO! EPISODES TO DATE
EPISODE EIGHTEEN: MELODRAMA
“Terror in Tarnation! A Thrilling Narrative in Three Acts”
EPISODE SEVENTEEN: POETRY
“landescapes”
EPISODE SIXTEEN: SILLY EUROPEAN SPY SPOOF (DUBBED)
“Diet Ray of the Stars!”
EPISODE FIFTEEN: EROTIC SUPERNATURAL ROMANCE
“The Shadow of Her Passion”
EPISODE FOURTEEN: FLYING:
“Sky Calling”
EPISODE THIRTEEN: SLAPSTICK:
“The Phantom of the Werewolf”
EPISODE TWELVE: DAIRY FARMING:
“Early One Morning”
EPISODE ELEVEN: BURROUGHS:
“Chapter Nine”
EPISODE TEN: WEREWOLVES:
“The Silver Solution”
EPISODE NINE: WRESTLING:
“Suckerslam XIV”
EPISODE EIGHT: JANE AUSTEN ROMANCE:
“The Proud and the Senseless”
EPISODE SEVEN: THE JAZZ AGE:
“The Bucky-Dusky-Ruby Red Hop!”
EPISODE SIX: SUBMISSION:
“Re-Org”
EPISODE FIVE: MASQUERADE:
“The Eyes Behind the Mask”
EPISODE FOUR: SELF HELP:
“Sausage Stew for the Slightly Overweight Presents:
Some Several Suggestions Guaranteeing Success for the Mildly Neurotic”
EPISODE THREE: NUDIST:
“If You Have To Ask ...”
EPISODE TWO: FRENCH BEDROOM FARCE:
“Un Nuit a Fifi’s!”
EPISODE ONE: STEAMPUNK:
“The Chase of the Purple Squid!”
A J.H.B. Original!
