Occasionally, I have written a blog about my favorite books of the year. Inevitably, I end up talking about some of the same books others have praised. For example, I read Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen, condensed into one 900-page volume from the original Watson trilogy. Part 1, first published as Killing Mister Watson, remains my favorite part of the story; I had read it years ago during a vacation in St. Petersburg, Florida—which seemed appropriate—as a separate, stand-alone novel. Part 2 is frankly boring, curiously lacking in narrative drive (a reflection of the personality of the narrator, E.J. Watson’s son, Lucius). Part 3 is in Watson’s voice, a retelling of the story from Part 1 that leads us to question whether Watson was indeed the monster of legend or simply misunderstood. No story stands on its own, of course. No story is entirely believable. I wrote to a friend of mine a few weeks ago that “everything is fiction”—to which he replied that he was not that post-modern. Like Rashomon, Shadow Country presents a slippery reality that, in the end, is meant to stand as a critique of our country’s own fictionalized history. I am that post-modern. The older I get the more certain I am that reality, as we call it, and fiction are indistinguishable. (Philip Roth famously said a couple of decades ago that it was no longer necessary to write fiction because reality trumps the imagination [my words, his idea], but he has been more prolific in the years since than he was before. I read his Exit Ghost this year because like Zuckerman I too have had prostate cancer and had read all of the other Zuckerman books and just needed to know how he was doing.)
I read and appreciated a number of books in 2008. As is my habit, I read many of them simultaneously, putting down Matthiessen to pick up James Wood’s How Fiction Works and then Joan Didion’s collected nonfiction in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (struck by the continuities between our political past and the 2008 political presence that emerge from her Political Fictions). While reading those books, I went back to Didion’s Play It As It Lays, I don’t know, maybe just to get even more depressed.
Speaking of political fictions, and being depressed, I read Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, alternating with Didion. The hidden horrors of the Bush years will continue to reveal themselves. Suskind’s book shows us our selves, as well as Bush, but in the end the book wanders off. The interwoven stories begin to feel like only a device, a form of fiction designed to tell us the truth but in the end reminding us that the telling of stories is no easier when they are meant to reveal the truth as it happened not as we experienced it emotionally. And to compound misery, I read Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, about how we became torturers. It was easy.
For reasons I won’t go into, I read The Strangers in the House, a novel by Georges Simenon—not one of his standard mysteries but what he called romans durs, explorations of the pain of ordinary life. The story is about a man who has lost his self, in a sense, and discovers that his daughter and her friends are leading a dangerous secret life that draws him in and reanimates him.
And there was the Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, perhaps as reasonable an emblem of 2008 as one can find. The book contains the thoughts of Senor C on the world, which is in a state of moral collapse (see previous books on the horrors of the Bush years). Simultaneously, and running through the book on the same pages of his reflections, we read of his growing interest in Anya, a young woman he hires to type the manuscript of his musings for a publisher. A third strain of the story, recounted on the same page as the other two, reveals the life of Anya and her partner Alan (who has designs on Senor C’s bank account). Each thread is divided on the page by rules: we can follow each on its own or hold all three in our heads, reading each on each page, unpeeling the story’s onion. The device works surprisingly well. But what is the truth or fiction of any of it? Each of us is running along on our own track, waving, but not telling secrets.
Perhaps the most interesting reading event, for me, was buying Amazon’s electronic reader Kindle in the early Fall. I have found it to be an exemplary tool. Reading books and other texts (whether blogs or my own manuscripts) on it is easy and easy on the eyes. The type size can be adjusted; type does not disappear in sunlight. I cannot read it in the dark because the screen is not backlit, but that particular sales pitch for eBook readers is probably of little interest to most people. I recommend the Kindle, or its alter ego the Sony Reader. The age of the electronic reader is here and more books and other texts are becoming available every day. (You can also read text on the iPhone, Blackberry, etc.–see Grown Up Digital, above) Reading several books at once, as I do, is easier on a Kindle; I can literally carry dozens of books around and shift my attention among them. I suspect that this aspect of reading on an electronic device will prove to change the way we read toward something approximating the way we surf the web. The Kindle also enables a certain amount of web surfing—and of course one buys books through a wireless connection to Amazon. The other night, near midnight, I wanted to buy a book I read about right then and within a few minutes, was able to begin reading—and for half the cost of the printed book, which I probably could not have found in a bookstore anyway. Many believe that reading on something other than a printed and bound book is a sacrilege. As someone has noted, the regard for the printed object might tip over into fetishism. (James Gleick is a recent example. He wrote in the Sunday New York Times a few weeks ago (“How To Publish Without Perishing”) that publishers should concentrate on producing a few beautiful copies of a few books to counter the wave of electronic degradation that threatens all we hold dear about literate culture. To which I say, why not print one copy and chain it to a table? Whoops. Been there, done that.)
Recall that the iPod was marketed with the question: What’s on your iPod? Soon, we can ask the same question about the Kindle. On mine at the moment (books I am currently reading) are: Moby Dick, The Long Tail (by Chris Anderson), Grown Up Digital (by Don Tapscott), Amerika (by Franz Kafka, in a new translation), and The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita (Swami Kriyana). Also on the Kindle are these books I have finished reading: Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Per Pettersen’s Out Stealing Horses, and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Summary judgments: Moby Dick is still too long but thrilling; The Long Tail is still important; Grown Up Digital is eye-opening if a bit too amblingly self-important (what the young people between 18 and 30 know that I don’t know and boy aren’t you sorry you’re over 60), Amerika is still strange in a new translation, The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita is longer than the original, Richard Ford is remarkably plodding and tells me more about New Jersey real estate than I want to know—and yet I do like the way he writes—, Home is a crashing bore, Out Stealing Horses is lovely and evocative, and For Whom the Bell Tolls does not engage me the way I am engaged by The Sun Also Rises.
And the Kindle is the book of the future, especially as we enter a year in which bookstores will close, publishers will struggle, and the book and how it is published and distributed will change for the first time in four hundred years. Stay tuned.
