2011 ABAW, the statistical retrospective

I set out to read at least one book each week last year. And I did it. I read a total of 58 books in 2011. That’s down from 2010’s 73 books, but I still did well.

In January I came up with a PLAN to read in four categories each month: a notable or classic book I’d never read, a book I’d read before, something published in the past two years (alternating fiction and nonfiction), and something banned by an idiot or recommended by a friend. I even preplanned about half the books I thought I’d read. 

Well, you know what they say about plans. 

I kept up with all of that for almost half a year. Turns out that I was no good at keeping track of which books were recommended by friends (virtually everything I read was recommended by someone), so that wasn’t a useful category. I’m also not very good at sticking to plans when it comes to my personal whims. I didn’t always feel like reading what came next on the list, so mostly I didn’t. Early in the year, I actively sought out banned books, but as a category, that one fell apart for me pretty quickly. Too many books are banned or challenged.

I read eleven books out loud to the kids. I’ve never counted that before, but my gut tells me that’s a lot. As they get bigger, the Sonars can keep listening longer. Even when we more frequently replace our out-loud reading time with their own personal reading time. 

I read five classic or notable books I’d previously missed. I don’t know why I found this category so difficult. There are so many books out there. I suppose I was less inspired by the oldies but goodies. Maybe that will change this year. 

I reread nine books. More than half of these were books reread to the Sonars. I love to see them rediscover great stories and notice new things. I want to keep working at this category this year. 

I read fifteen nonfiction books. I did better in this category than I remembered, though this category was bulked up by several summer skims and a little research for a novel. 

I abandoned two books. One for sheer boredom and one for shift in season. (I’m not counting the handful of books that I picked up but didn’t really start before putting them back into the To-Read pile) I started reading Far From the Madding Crowd last January. I quit and came back to it four times, but can’t bring myself to finish it. It was my first serious eBook and the first time I left it, I thought maybe it was the format. But since I finished at least four other books in the electronic format in 2011, I think it’s just Hardy. The other book I didn’t finish was When Santa Fell to Earth, our traditional Christmas read. Our December reading time was more interrupted than normal, and we started it late. We all love the story, but once Christmas passed, the Sonars were ready to read something else. We’ll catch it next December. 

I skipped twenty-four books that were on the plan in January. They’ve all gone on a To-Read list. Maybe I can knock out a few of them in 2012.

My first book for 2012 is The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. I’d tell you what I hope to read next, but that might just jinx it. What’s on your reading list this year? 

ABAW: The Fall by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

The Fall: Book 2 of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

William Morrow 2010, library copy

Check out my comments on The Strain here. 

This trilogy is sort of Outbreak meets Bram Stoker’s Dracula in post-9-11 New York City. The Fall picks up right where The Strain ends, with very little back fill. Mayhem and destruction grips the globe as a vampire plague spreads quickly from an epicenter in New York City. The team of heroes is set.

• Eph: Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, former CDC epidemiologist, now a discredited fugitive wanted for murder (alcoholic, divorced, devoted father who doesn’t want to screw up anymore).
• Nora: Dr. Nora Martinez, also of the CDC (token woman and Eph’s love interest, with bonus aging mother suffering from dementia).
• Fet: Vasiliy Fet, NYC pest control officer, the talented Ukrainian-American rat-catcher (and my favorite character from this book; his tool of choice: nail gun loaded with silver nails).
• Abe: Dr. Abraham Setrakian, the Van Helsing of the set, pursuer of vamps since his time at Treblinka (complete with heart problem requiring nitroglycerin tablets).
• Gus: Augusto Elizande, the gang-banger turned vampire mercenary (a resourceful survivor, and my favorite character in book one).
• Zack: Zackary Goodweather, son of Eph, whose mom Kelly is now vamped and wanting to turn him too (grieving for his mom, with bonus asthma).   

They have some tools for self-defense and close fighting of vamps, but Abe wants to destroy The Master, his longtime nemesis and the source of the scourge. To do that, he needs a special book, uncoincidentally about to go up for auction for millions of dollars at Sotheby’s in New York. 

The enemies are many.

• The Master, the youngest of the seven ancients and the originators of all vampires on earth. He currently occupies the body of a European giant. He’ll trade up to a Marilyn-Manson-style rock star by the end of book 2.
• The Ancients, three Old World and three New World who are less than happy with their little brother. They equip and bankroll a number of mercenaries, including Gus, to contain The Master’s mess. Turns out though, that The Master’s plan was their too all along. He just took control and sped up the timeline.
• Eldritch Palmer, one of the three richest people on earth. Sickly his whole life and propped up by extraordinary and unsavory medical practices, Palmer provides the funds and the conspiratorial connections to help The Master in his plot. In exchange, Palmer wants to be a vamp. Alliances between bad guys don’t usually end well. Especially for the weaker bad guy. 

I think the suspense of the unknown in the first book made it scarier than the second. This one is more focused on logistics, filling in the history, and assembling the key pieces for the final confrontation to come. I am disappointed (but not surprised) that not all of our heroes make it to book 3. No I’m not naming the casualty.

Some people have complained about the constantly shifting perspective in the stories, offering a wide-ranging viewpoint on the catastrophe, including minor, disposable characters. I think the shift in point of view is a strength of the story. While the main plot is tightly focused on our band of heroes, the disaster reaches around the globe. Tucking in other viewpoints reminds us of the external and epic mayhem without distracting from the main story. My favorite sub-plots are the astronaut on the International Space Station and the tagger named Phade.

My main complaint about the story… The first book seemed to grow out of fear of terrorism (which was tight), but this one is environmentalism? Nuclear reactors? Really? The books are fast-paced, heart-thumping, fear-jumping good stories though. I look forward to what happens to Fet and Gus, and wonder whether Eph can avoid complete self-destruction to lead the team. I also wonder how the role of Love will play out in the accounting of the story. 

The final book of the trilogy, The Night Eternal is due out October 2011.

ABAW Twofer: Gossamer by Lois Lowry and The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

Gossamer by Lois Lowry, Yearling, 2006

A lonely woman fosters a troubled boy. They are both strengthened and healed by the small creatures that bring them dreams in the night. Littlest One is a dream-bringer under the tutelage of Thin Eldest. Each night, the pair visits the house of an old woman. When she takes in John, an angry young survivor of abuse, the skill of the small dream-bringers is tested. John’s vulnerability makes him susceptible to fearsome Sinisteeds, horrifying bringers of nightmares. The dream-bringers build dreams by gently touching the cherished objects of the people they visit: a button, a shell, a family afghan, a photograph, a stuffed animal. John has precious few cherished objects to touch. His time with the old woman changes this. Littlest One cannot stop the Sinisteeds from tormenting John, but with the power of her dreams, she is able to make him stronger, and in the process, to grow in strength and confidence herself. 

This is a sweet, quiet story, occurring over a couple of weeks at the end of one summer vacation. Though the dream-bringers are quite fantastic, the story of the relationships between the people is realistic and touching. Not all is resolved in this story because life is not that simple and the torment John and his mother have suffered is significant. But we do get a sense that each of the three main characters, the old woman, John, and his mother, are set on a road in which they can heal themselves and things will get better. I loved reading this book out loud to all the Sonars. This is a beautiful story to build empathy and to illustrate the importance of dreams and of understanding the story of each person in the world. Perhaps it could also be used as a healing tool for families surviving abuse. 

The Kane Chronicles Book 1: The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

In the same spirit, structure, and sense of adventure that Riordan gave to us with the Percy Jackson novels, The Red Pyramid takes us on a ride through Egyptian mythology in the modern world. Carter Kane travels the world with his archaeologist father. They stop in to London once or twice a year to visit Carter’s sister Sophie. She has lived there with their grandparents since the tragic death of their mother. The siblings are beginning to wonder why they’ve been kept separate for so long and just what happened to their mom. Before they can get answers, dad blows up the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, gets entombed in an alternate plane, and releases a handful of Egyptian gods, including the chaos god Set. With the help of a mysterious uncle, a cat-goddess, a baboon, and an albino crocodile, Carter and Sophie have to learn how to use their magic, escape the wizards of the House of Life, and stop Set from blowing up Phoenix.

The Sonars really liked this one and we look forward to reading subsequent books featuring Carter and Sophie. 

ABAW October-November Edition

I know, October and November ended a long time ago. I am a slacker in more ways than one.

I have read much, much less the past few months than I did earlier in the year. When I began planning for NaNoWriMo, my daily reading time was cut down by my planning and writing time. These two need each other though, so I must seek balance between the reading and writing.    

October

One Day by David Nicholls

This one might be my favorite book this year. It’s at least in my top three. Read my review here. 

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

I struggled with this one. Read my review here. 

How I Write by Janet Evanovich

This is Janet Evanovich’s memoir on her writing process that expands on a Q&A from her website. I love Evanovich’s writing style. Irreverent but honest, clever, accessible, and funny. I reread very few books, but I come back to the first four Stephanie Plum novels over and over. Reading about Evanovich’s writing confirms what we know as writers: writing is hard, it’s a job, we have to work at it, and then we have to work at it some more, and if we work hard enough maybe we’ll have the chance to get published and continue to work hard.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

The back cover of this book suggests that it is about the way in which a story is born from events. I’m not a Christian, but I know the gospels well, and it was fascinating reading Pullman’s deployment of the story of Jesus. He builds plausible scenarios for the events, actions, words, and ideas that might have inspired the narratives, parables, and metaphors in the gospels as we have them now.  You can read about Pullman’s personal philosophy here, but don’t let the atheism scare you away from this book.  I know that the redeployment of the story of Jesus, this way of trying to find a plausible explanation for what many believe was miraculous, is potentially offensive to some. To that I say, read this book with an open mind. Literature, as many of us know, has the amazing power to make us FEEL and understand things in ways that we don’t expect. I found Pullman’s depiction of the story of Jesus to be very inspiring precisely because I felt connected to the essential humanity of the characters. I felt very acutely the sacrifice that the characters make in a way that makes me want to be more compassionate toward my fellow human beings. Philosophy aside, the plotting of the story is also really good. Pullman managed to take one of the most famous stories of all time and surprise me with it.

November

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Ok, no, I still haven’t finished this one. It is beautifully written, but I find that I have to read it in small doses. I’m frustrated on behalf of the women in the story and I get emotional and angry as I read some of it.  Each time I put it down, it gets harder to pick up. Couple that with reader’s guilt. I haven’t read all of the books discussed in the story, including Lolita! So I have put this book down several times thinking that I should read these other books and then come back to this one. It’s a heartless cycle for me.  Yet another title that shows I don’t do well as a reader of non-fiction and memoir, even if I really really love the subject matter.

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

I enjoyed the idea of this book, planning month-by-month activities throughout the year to increase one’s overall happiness. Rubin has a website to encourage us to build our own happiness projects as well. As she says in her introduction, each person’s path to happiness is different and individual, but reading about her very particular path was edifying. I find I’ve made small adjustments in the way I think about the things I do, and even if I go no further in developing a happiness project, I find that very satisfying.

Composed by Rosanne Cash

I love Cash’s writing style. She has a fluid way of structuring her prose so that one incident, idea, or metaphor can recall and connect to earlier ideas.  I’ve never listened to her music, but saw her on a recent episode of Austin City Limits and was intrigued by The List.  When she turned 18, her father gave her a list of what he considered essential songs for her to know if she wanted to be a musician. Cash’s latest album is selections from that list. I have enjoyed discovering her music (and her twitterfeed) and am even more in love with Austin City Limits for teaching me about artists I might not discover in other ways.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

I finished reading this one out-loud to the Sonars. Yes, we all still love it.

These Days

I’ve been reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire to the Sonars. This is our second time through out-loud. I love how well the stories are holding up to the growth of the kids and to my growth as a writer.

I came home from the library last week with Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story.  I love the first line (“Dearest Diary, Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die.”). I’m a bit baffled by the first chapter.  After this I’m considering The Passage by Justin Cronin or The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. Which would you choose?  

For Christmas the past few years, we’ve made a habit of reading Cornelia Funke’s When Santa Fell to Earth. This year we’re going to listen to Funke read it on our 900-mile drive. If you haven’t found this gem of a holiday story, please go check it out.  I love the way that Funke takes the best bits of magical Santa tradition and adds just the right kind of modernity to it, so that the story feels both more real in the context and more magical in the details. And I can’t tell you how much I’m in love with Nicholas Goodfellow. He could live under my Christmas tree any day.  Ahem. 

Book Response: One Day by David Nicholls

I want to call it a love story, but I might be more accurate if I take the words from Emma, one of the main characters, and say that this is a novel about two people who grow up together. 

Emma and Dexter. Dexter and Emma. These two hook up at a graduation party on July 15, 1988. The book narrates their lives, together and separately, on July 15th each year after that for nearly twenty years.  We see and hear about only those things that they think and do on July 15. This structure could be odd, forcing the author to provide a great deal of back story for each year, but Nicholls deploys the structural trope so cleverly. I never felt like I was being force-fed information.  I occasionally wished I could see more of their lives because I loved the characters so much, but bits and pieces of their experiences emerged through the natural progression of living and remembering. In this novel as in life, often we don’t understand the significance of an event until much later in the story. 

Emma and Dexter are friends. We know that each one loves the other, but their friendship is filled with near-misses so tantalizing that we’re almost satisfied. We see how they are both brought together and pulled apart by their action and inaction.  Dexter is a pretty boy from a privileged background. He is sexually very promiscuous and a career alcoholic. Emma comes from humble origins, is politically liberal and vocal, and works hard for everything in her life. Nicholls paints their weaknesses—Dexter’s drink and personal uncertainty is a louder version of Emma’s self-limiting lack of confidence and self-knowledge—with honesty so that we love them both in spite of the stupid things they (ok, mostly Dex) sometimes do.

They have so little in common. We don’t know exactly why they make good friends, but they do. They reserve for one another an honesty and a humor that is absent in their other relationships.  When that—often snarky—honesty breaks down, so does their friendship. But it comes back. The things that we think most likely to drive them apart are often what bring them closer together.

The writing is beautiful.  The one day structure could be clumsy, but Nicholls carries it off with grace. That one day tends to become slightly loaded, perhaps overloaded, with significance for Dexter and Emma, but there’s an implicit argument that each person has days like that on the calendar. Days that for one reason or another attract significance on top of significance.

You will laugh at the dialogue sometimes. Emma and Dexter are so funny with each other. If you are like me, you will also weep. No, you will sob.  Great, body-wracking sobs of grief and anger and surprise and disappointment.  I can’t recall a book in recent memory that has elicited such a profound emotional reaction from me. Don’t quit the book when Nicholls punches you in the gut though. Stay with the story. The final chapters give you what you’ve been hoping for the whole book. They surprise you with what Emma and Dexter have had all along, since that very first July 15.

A stunningly beautiful book that I recommend to anyone wanting to enjoy or write rich characters living in honest realism.