Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Denver has one of everything. Except for Grateful Dead bars. It has two of those.
-Jordan, on what she knows about Denver.
On How To Spend Free Time
You confuse being weird and spending time alone … But anyone who’s really interested in anything spends time alone …If you want to be good at something, you have to practice, and usually you practice by yourself.
-Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld
Year in Read, 2011
This was the year I left New York. It was also the year I learned it’s possible to read without riding the subway. Looking over the list, in 2011, I especially enjoyed being in the middle of a big book. I guess I like to spend time in a world someone else made. There are also a lot of books on this list that I didn’t really enjoy, just read. But I like reading, and when you like a verb, you do it in any form that presents itself.
KEY:
® - Raronauer Recommends
* - Reread
/ - Didn’t finish
A Short History of Women /, Kate Walbert
Pale Fire, Vladmir Nabakov
I read for a book club, and I enjoyed the sausage lasagna the host served more than the book.
The Fall®*, Albert Camus
I got a lot more out of this book as a 27 year-old than I did as a 15 year-old.
For Whom The Bell Tolls®*, Ernest Hemingway
And so began Hemingway month!
A Moveable Feast®, Ernest Hemingway
I bought this book for myself, retail, as a reward for doing a job I didn’t want to do but couldn’t turn down. It was a great way to treat myself.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Ernest Hemingway
A Visit From The Goon Squad*, Jennifer Egan
Just Kids by Patti Smith
A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy
This list includes all the books I read straight through, or at least tried to, this year. But I came back to specific stories by Maile Meloy throughout the year, specifically, “Agustin,” “Garrison Junction” and “The Children.”
The Nick Adams Stories, Ernest Hemingway
Bearing the Body, Ehud Havazelet
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Art of Racing in the Rain /, Garth Stein
I couldn’t finish this book narrated by a dog, but one of my friends from book club actually liked it. I think that speaks to how much she likes reading.
Miami®, Joan Didion
Despite being the fifth location of the Real World, by city limits, it’s actually pretty small. Didion, as always, does a deft job of explaining why Miami has taken on such international and cultural importance. If you ever want to go beyond the “I sort of know there’s a situation with Cuba” understanding of Miami, I recommend this book. I also recommend this twitter feed.
Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
After I got a fight with someone I was dating about Livestrong bracelets, I put this book on reserve at the library. Soon after the book was available, it won the Pultizer, and I felt I had to read it. Not an uplifting situation.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love®, Raymond Carver
Some credit goes to Gordon Lish.
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
Another story about a failed attempt to start a book club.
Cooking for Mr. Latte®, Amanda Hesser
If you like reading about rich white people eating—which is a real thing to like!—this is the book for you.
Heartburn, Nora Ephron
The Custom of the Country®, Edith Wharton
The Keep, Jennifer Egan
Great Plains®, Ian Frazier
The Heart Says Whatever, Emily Gould
Civilwarland in Bad Decline, George Saunders
The Collected Stories of Grace Palely, Grace Palely
The Good Soldiers®, David Finkel
Revolutionary Road®, Richard Yates
The Rez, Ian Frazier
I found this at a used bookstore in Rapid City, SD on the road with my friend who had lent me The Great Plains. We read it to each other as we finished driving across the country.
The John McPhee Reader®, John McPhee
The Loser, Thomas Bernhard
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
You can’t appreciate this book without having read other Joan Didion, which I learned first hand after rereading this book.
A Visit from the Goon Squad®*, Jennifer Egan
Not a typo, I read it twice in one year.
Notes on Yellowstone, Jim Carrier
A Backwards Glance, Edith Wharton
Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney
I read this book in a day at work.
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse
1Q84®, Haruki Murakami
Emma, Jane Austen
Food Matters®, Mark Bittman
Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Nondenominational holiday music on repeat.
Nearing the End
I find end of year lists released in early December a little offensive. Offensive is too strong a word, but you know, culture is still coming out in these final days. So I will wait until December 31 to release my year in read list. That said, since finishing 1Q84, I’ve had a lot of trouble getting into another book. After all these years of reading on my own, I still can never figure out the right book to read for whatever mood I’m in. I always end up with history books or short stories on a plane, which is the exact wrong thing for me.
But at December 22, the facts are on the table: we are getting to the end of the year, and I’ll probably only read one or two more books in 2011. But while 2012 doesn’t start for another week and a half, starting today, the days will be getting longer. And even if it’s too early for year-end lists, it’s not too early for a stiff drink to celebrate that.
The first time I was homesick in Denver was when I saw info for the premier of Girl Walk // All Day. I had become accustomed to being in the city where premiers occurred, and I was bummed about missing out on what I imagined to be (and turned out to be) an amazing dance party in Brooklyn. But as is the case with most forms of self-pity, it was all for not, because Girl Walk // All Day is coming to Denver this Thursday. // More info on the screening here. // Interview with director Jacob Krupnick on Listen Up Denver! here.
Sweet Talk
Two days before we left Fort Niagara, we took the dog, Duke, to Charlie Battery, fourteen miles from the post, and left him with the mess sergeant. We were leaving him for only six weeks, until we could settle in Oklahoma and send for him. He had stayed at Charlie Battery before, when we visited our relatives in Ohio at Christmastime. He knew there were big meaty bones at Charlie Battery, and scraps of chicken, steak and turkey, slices of cheese, special big-dog bowls of ice cream. The mess at Charlie Battery was Dog Heaven, so gave us a soft, forgiving look as we walked with him from the car to the back of the mess hall.
My mother said, as she always did at times like that, “I wish he knew more English.”
When I think about “success” as a writer, I mostly think I’d be happy just to write every day. But in my more ambitious idle thoughts, I dream of being on the New Yorker fiction podcast, reading and discussing some long forgotten story from the magazine’s archives with Deborah Treisman.
My all-time favorite New Yorker fiction podcast is Tobias Wolff reading Stephanie Vaughn’s “Dog Heaven,” excerpted above. I love this one in part because it’s a story about dogs, in part because Vaughn so deftly captures what it’s like to be powerless because of age, that is, what it’s like to be a child, and in part because the podcast introduced me to Stephanie Vaughn.
At the end of that podcast, Triesman and Wolff have a sort of awkward, or awkward if you’re Stephanie Vaughn, chat about why Vaughn hasn’t published anything recently. Guys, I’m sure she’s working on it.
This was all in 2008, and in this month’s podcast, Tea Obreht reads another story from Vaughn’s collection, “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog,” which is just as moving as “Dog Heaven” though not as much about dogs. This time, Treisman doesn’t question Vaughn’s work ethic, but announces happily that Sweet Talk is being reissued.
(I wish the Internet would report on how that initial podcast with Tobias Wolff ultimately led to the reissuing of Sweet Talk.)
All this is a long way of saying: listen to the New Yorker fiction podcast. Whether you start with my favorite story, “Dog Heaven,” or the most recent one, “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog,” you’ll meet Stephanie Vaughn, a great writer whose time has come in the age of podcasts.
Other Realities
So there’s this piece on Slate about a writer who lost her computer in a cab, and after a bout of self-loathing, she bought a new computer. This was a story because a year after she got a new computer, she checked her Facebook Other Messages and learned that someone had found her computer soon after she lost it and wanted to return it.
And what are Facebook Other Messages? Something no one checks right below Facebook Messages.
Obviously, the only thing to do after reading that article was to check my own Facebook Other Messages. And wouldn’t you know it, but I also had an alternate reality hidden for me there.
A woman whose house I looked at in September, and whose spare bedroom I was interested in, sent me a message on Facebook to invite me to move in. Because we weren’t Facebook friends, her message got hidden in the Other section. We never became roommates, and we will probably never become Facebook friends either.
While I would have moved in there—it was a furnished room, which appealed to me at the time—I ended up in my own place, an attic apartment with good light and tons of wood paneling. My apartment is probably the best thing in my life right now. Or at least it’s the thing I think about when my yoga class goes in the “take a moment to be thankful for something” direction.
In a quote brought to my attention by a recent episode of Gossip Girl, Albert Camus once said, “Life is a sum of all your choices.” It’s also the sum of all the things you didn’t get to choose. Still, it’s rare to see the mechanics of fate, and in this case, I was lucky not be given a voice.
