Eglentyne's 2010 Literary Awards

Another post about all the stuff I read last year, because when I read 73 books, I want to milk it for all it’s worth.

Drawing from those books I finished in 2010 here are my completely subjective and non-scientific award choices. Yes, there are multiple winners in some categories. I can do that because they are MY completely subjective and unscientific awards. If you disagree, post a note in the comment or get your own list.

Better Together

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

Read them Aloud, Twice (Or listen to the author read them, or just read them to yourself. No matter what, these are awesome with kids.)

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie, Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman, The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo (OH! to write such prose!), and When Santa Fell to Earth by Cornelia Funke

Best Real, Live, Honest-to-goodness Humans (aka Non-Fiction)

Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman and Tinsel by Hank Stuever

Best Illustration of a How a Story Can be Born

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

Most Likely to Make Me Pull Out My Hair Wondering Why I’m Still Reading It (as I turn it upside down for the fourth time)

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Best Step-On-Your-Face-If-You’re-a-Sadistic-Pig, Butt-kicking, theorem-solving Character

Lisbeth Salander from the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson

Still Crazy After All These Years

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton 

My Dear Watson

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Best Supernatural Reboot

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (no relation)

Stunningly Good Writing for any Readers, but tagged as Young Adult

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak and When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Best Short-Story Collection

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

Best Use of Mathematics to Illustrate the Poignancy of Human Relationships

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Most Likely to Make Me Wish I Could Write Like That

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak, Juliet Naked by Nick Hornby, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Tinkers by Paul Hardin, and…

My Very Favorite Book I Read Last Year, as well as The One that Made Me Flat-Out Bawl for Twenty Minutes

One Day by David Nicholls

What Will 2011 Bring? Stay tuned… 

ABAW December Edition

On our trip to New Mexico, we upheld our Christmas tradition of reading Cornelia Funke’s When Santa Fell to Earth by listening to the audiobook version, beautifully read by Funke herself. I’ve commented about this book before. I can attest that the book becomes more magical and poignant for me each time we read it. 

The other book I finished in December was also a Christmas story.

Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present by Hank Stuever.  

This is not a book I would have picked up on my own, but my friend Vicki gave it to me and I couldn’t resist her recommendation. I started reading it in New Mexico, with Christmas lights blinking over my head, football games flashing on the tv, and the people I love most in the world gathered nearby. 

Stuever, a pop-culture writer for the Washington Post, spent three Christmases observing Frisco, Texas, trying to find some understanding of the cultural phenomenon of Christmas in the United States. He finds both excess and sincerity, waste and love, confusion and certainty in the ways in which the people of Frisco celebrate Christmas. Stuever was embedded with several families in Frisco. He gets to know them by watching them wrap and unwrap, by helping them decorate, by talking with them, and hanging out with them at parties and in quiet moments and while they shop.  He looks, as it were, under the wrapping paper to see what lurks there.  He finds a big idea of Christmas in Frisco, but he also finds something personal, an understanding of his own Christmas artifacts and rituals, an understanding of where the Christmas love in his life could be found. 

The timing of Stuever’s project also allowed him to observe the top of the economic bubble in 2006, and the harsh economic decline that followed for Frisco, like other American cities, over the next two years. 

This book is sharply observant, witty and touching without becoming overly sentimental. There is a kind of beauty in the excess of Christmas and there is a kind of ugliness, though no one likes to look directly at that for too long. Stuever very cleverly hits Christmas from almost every angle you can imagine: examining theology, history, economy, geopolitics, psychology, sociology, electricity, and more, even connecting aspects of Christmas to a sense of manifest destiny and and civil engineering.  He engages all of these aspects in accessible ways, helping us to know and understand, and perhaps to love, the families he writes about.  His subtle conclusion—alluded to in the subtitle, but never directly restated in the text—seems to be about the importance of presence. But don’t believe for one second that his conclusion is cliche, or that this is a tale of personal epiphany, or that Stuever ever abandons his pointed skepticism.

I did not know Stuever’s writing before this, but I seek him out in the Post now and you should too.

A Book A Week 2010 Retrospective

According to my tabulations I read 73 books last year. That number is staggering to me. That’s more books than I’ve read for the past several years with small children (welcome back, adult intellectual activity). You can check here for the month-by-month list, including links to comments I made about the books (if I made any on the blog). 

I chose the books on the list as I went, abandoning some, returning to a few later, in a rather haphazard fashion. I read at a much greater rate earlier in the year than I did later in the year. During the summer I swallowed up books with little effort. From September forward I had to push myself to finish every book. I attribute the difference to LIFE factors rather than to the quality of the books I was reading. 

In 2011 I have A PLAN. I know, always dangerous, setting myself up for failure, yes, yes. I have already chosen most of the books I want to read according to a few basic criteria. I want to read a lot. 

Each month I will read 1) a notable/classic book that I have not read, 2) a book I’ve read before, 3) something published in the past two years, alternating fiction and non-fiction, and 4) a recommended book, alternating between suggestions from trusted readers and from the ALA banned/challenged book list. A fifth, unlisted category exists as well, those books that I read out loud to the Sonars. I’ll include these books in my discussion as the year goes along.  Right now we’re reading The Goblet of Fire.

I’ve filled in a chart on my wall with book titles, leaving some spaces for new books and for recommendations. I will almost certainly make substitutions along the way.  I’m open for recommendations from YOU, by the way. Hit me in the comments with books you’ve loved.

Here’s what I’ve planned for 1Q 2011:

January

Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

February

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hossein, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (yep, still need to finish this one), and The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

March

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, [Recent Fiction, which I will choose spontaneously at the library], and Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie

What are you reading?

Home Again

We packed up the van (not OUR van, a rental, because our van had a double-whammy, pre-trip hissy fit) and drove to Albuquerque and back for the Christmas holidays. The traveling was lovely, the Sonars had a great time, the visit with family was rich, and I am very happy.

We left Coastal Texas in the afternoon on December 20th, with stories about the eclipse looping on the radio. That night, we were too tired to stay awake or to wake up for the eclipse, but as we stopped for the night in Sonora, Texas, I wrote, “Sonora under a solstice eclipse.” The moon was so big, a dusky color, like it was preparing for its big scene later that night.  

The next morning I was moved again by the windmills near Fort Stockton. Longtime readers here might remember that I wrote about the windmills last time we drove through. They line up like wanderers along the front edges of the mesas, soaring and spinning, roaring with the updrafts charging up the ridges.

At lunch that day we ate at Farley’s in Roswell, New Mexico and soaked up the delicious alien kitsch. The smart woman tending the bar there enhanced our lunch with a little Gaga, and the menu reminded us that “It’s better to live and learn than die stupid.”

Just around sunset on our second day of driving, we pulled through the mountain pass and into east Albuquerque to see that city dressed up in her winter jewels, the city lights twinkling on all around us. 

We visited with family that I hadn’t seen for decades. I managed to finish some last-minute knitting and felting (in the bathtub!) for Christmas gifts. We ate posole and chicken stuffed sopaipillas with green chile, and homemade marshmallows (Everyone should make marshmallows at least once in their life. We make them each year around the holidays.). I learned how to properly make our family’s fruit salad (yep, I’d been doing it wrong and I’m so glad to be enlightened).  We drove up into the mountains east of the city and found mud puddles and sledding-snow in the same spot. We slid and slid and slid and managed to get only our shoes muddy. 

I hope your holidays had some marshmallows and mud and a lot of love in them.

Memorable notes from the not-a-journal:

Did you say Deli Bean?

Deep Sand Beyond Shoulder

Pump jacks and the miasma of H2S every two skips (“Do Not Stop in Low Places”)

Me and Billy the Kid never got along, and outgoing D-Gov Bill Richardson should not pardon him. Dad reminds me that without clever writers, no one would even know about Billy the Kid. Or Jesus, I add in my head, winking and taking the hug.

Red or Green? Hot or Mild? Corn or Flour?

From am radio: Rupert Parish Disposal, Our Business Stinks but it’s Picking Up

Best railroad car graffitti: “snow” dripping from the “eaves” of a cargo box

Sympathetic Ignition

At Frog Pond Creek, somewhere in Texas, in the early morning fog, the Sonars inform me that this is good D&D fog, to cloak early morning travelers across the plains.

There IS a Garden of Eden in Eden, Texas.

Upon our return to the coastal plains: the land is so flat I feel like I can see the curve of the Earth.

And now he is Six

Re-posted and tidied up. One of these days I’ll figure out this whole scheduling thing. One of these days.

I know that I posted this same poem back when Sonar X7 first became Sonar X6, but it is just so lovely and so perfect for becoming six that I can’t help but repeat it now that Sonar X5 is turning into Sonar X6. Are you confused yet? Don’t be. Someone had a birthday, a scrumptious someone. 

Here’s what he looked like when we brought him home on Christmas eve, six years ago. I know you all wanted to see the one where we put him under the tree like a package, with a bow on his head, but it turns out you can’t see the bow in the picture and he’s screaming and unhappy. Trust me when I tell you that this one is much cuter. And it features the hand-knitting that my luscious friends made for us. And tea. Because I love tea.  

Sonar X4Days 

He has grown, just a little bit, that pudgy little monkey, and now he is six. Let’s all have a collective sigh of relief that he has made it this far. 

A freshly minted Sonar X6 dressed up as Peter Pan playing soccer and pretending to be a cowboy 

“The End” from Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne

When I was one, I had just begun.

When I was Two, I was nearly new. 

When I was Three, I was hardly me. 

When I was Four, I was not much more. 

When I was Five, I was just alive. 

But now I am Six, I am clever as clever, 

So I think I’ll be Six now for ever and ever.