It's been a terrific year already for books over here so I thought, why not?
Just finished Grace, by the Irish novelist Paul Lynch. Takes place during the potato famine. Extraordinary prose, a bit challenging at first, very idiosyncratic. I think you'd classify it a bildungsroman.
Finished the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson this year. This is hard sci-fi, but KSR is so smart and intellectually widespread and such a good writer it doesn't feel geeky. (His Shaman from a few years back is one of the best novels I've ever read--it was inspired by Werner Herzog's documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams about 45,000 year-old cave paintings in northern France, and so far every one I've turned on to it has loved it--and been surprised by it--as well. KSR rules.) Blue Mars wasn't the book its predecessors (Red Mars and Green Mars) were, but I'm so glad I read the trilogy. Really makes one think about new beginnings, and though he wrote them in the 90s they seem particularly of the moment right now.
Our book club's read Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead so far this year. The former I put down in exasperation a third of the way through. The latter I finished and found very thought-provoking, though probably not always in ways Whitehead intended. It was good but the Pulitzer and the National Book Award?
I'm really excited about two books I just started: The Overstory by Richard Powers and Farewell to the Horse by Ulrich Raulff. The Overstory is actually about trees. A sprawling novel that took like four pages to change the way I see the world. Pretty sure I'm going to have to read all the Richard Powers books now. And Farewell is a perhaps unclassifiable history of the end of the era of horses. (In the intro he references a fellow historian who separated human history into three eras: before horses, horses, after horses.) It promises to be incredible. Raulff and Powers both have astonishing brains, and it's fun to binge on horses and trees at the same time.
The quantum leap in my life this year has been discovering that I prefer listening to audio books while at the gym than music/podcasts, and that I prefer listening to audio books in the car than music, and that absolutely anything (especially an audio book) is preferable to listening to the news. So I listened to Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy and am two and a half books into Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series. The Renault was a revelation. Really lush historical fiction with serious plotting excellence and crystalline characterization. I feel like the third book might have served as a specific inspiration for Game of Thrones. The second was terrific, if a bit too eunuchy, and the first I just flat adored. Oliver Stone's amazingly terrible Alexander was based on these beautiful books. Tana French was recommended to me by my sister in Austin. The first book (Into the Woods) was so-so, the second (The Likeness) I loved, and so far the third (Faithful Place) is the best yet.
Let's see, what else?
Oh yeah, read Tim Kreider's second book of essays, I Wrote this Book Because I love You. His first book, We Learn Nothing, stands as one of my favorite exposes of a fellow human mind. This one I liked a lot but you can't ever have first love again, I guess. Where the first was variously about his friendships, politics, aging, love, sex and family, this one is almost exclusively about women he's been with. And it doesn't have any of his brilliant cartoons 'cause I guess he doesn't want to do cartoons anymore. Oh well. C'est la vie. It's still a book filled with jewel-like essays.
