January Reads

One of my New Year's resolutions was to read three books a week (or 13 books a month or 156 books this year, depending on which counting scheme worked best). These are the books I read in January:

1. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

God, this book.  Even as a restaurant kitchen autobiography--the kind made popular by the likes of Anthony Bourdain--it is only of limited value. The author is a nearly complete asshole who devotes nearly half of the book to complaining about her marriage and the hardship of vacationing for a month in Italy every year. I hear the movie rights have been sold and that Gwyneth Paltrow will be playing the author. I despise Gwyneth Paltrow (though only in a very casual way), so her casting seems fitting. 

2. and 3. Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson*

These are hilarious books, Ms. Jackson's books about her life as a housewife and mother. Really strange and charming and funny and strange.  It's not hard to believe that this is the same woman who wrote "The Lottery."

4. The Lost Carving: Journey to the Heart of Making by David Esterly

I had high hopes for this book, being something of a carver--clay, not wood--myself. But it was a disappointment for the most part, rambling and pretentious. There were, say, about eight good pages in the 200+ page book and fortunately those eight pages made the whole thing worth reading. Almost.

5. Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene

I'm a big fan of the cynical Mr. Greene, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that I am also a big fan of the uncynical Mr. Greene. This was a lovely, funny, hopeful book, completely unexpected. 

 (On a completely tangential note: Toward the end of January, I was casting about on the internet and came across a movie review that Greene wrote about a Shirley Temple movie, which he basically called child pornography. (He was sued for libel over it and, I think, lost the case.) That led down an internet rabbit hole into the early 20's phenomenon called "Baby Burlesks," a strange run of short films (some found on youtube) in which a three-year-old Shirley Temple plays at different times a French prostitute and an American prostitute. Turning back and chasing down more of Greene's history, I found that he had worked for the British Secret Service, MI6, after having been recruited by his own sister.)

6. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

This short novel begins with the arrival of a group of Japanese brides in the US and ends when just after the beginning of World War II when the Japanese were rounded up into camps. The author uses a strange narrative device: There is no main character, only the voices of several people, all women, who speak as "we" (we did this, we felt this way, we believed this, we reacted thusly). It sometimes works.

7. The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain

At the end of 2012, I watched Ken Burns's documentary about Mark Twain, who has long been one of my favorite authors. I read this short, unfinished novel by Twain because the documentary made it sound intriguing and I had never read it before.  Twain is at his cynical best here, but also unusually bitter. The structure of the early sections suggest that he intended for it to be a longer work, but it stands alone now and it doesn't teeter nearly as much as you might expect it to.  In the novel, innocence personified meets Satan--and, as one might expect, Satan comes out seeming the more reasonable of the two.

8. Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard*

A re-read; I love when Annie Dillard writes about the arctic explorers who failed miserably but honorably.

9. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

As I read, I compared this work to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, some early novels by George Orwell, "The Waltons" TV show, and maybe some John Steinbeck. There wasn't any one character that gripped me, unfortunately, and I found the lack of such to be a weakness in the novel. (Then again I am addicted to a strong central narrator, so much so that works that lack one seem to me to be lesser works even when there is evidence to the contrary.)

10. Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo**

I wanted to like this more than I did.

11. Something Like An Autobiography by Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa is funny and mean and irreverent and fiercely, unapologetically talented. This was one of the best, if not the best book I read all month.

12. A Kiss Before You Go: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Danny Gregory

An awful, heartbreaking, true story about losing someone you love and had expected to spend the rest of your life with. I would read more by Danny Gregory.

13. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

Dear Sugar has always blown me away, from the very first time I laid eyes on her writing. She hands out relentlessly human advice, relentlessly human, the way I hope to be some day.  The most moving exchange in the book as far as I'm concerned was initially published online here, at The Rumpus.

14. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories by Haruki Murakami**

Who doesn't love Murakami? My favorite stories from this collection: "The Seventh Man" and "A Shinagawa Monkey."  Murakami's writing reminds me a lot of David Lynch's movies. Lynch takes the expressions of speech that rule our lives and makes them into moving pictures. Murakami takes the often indescribable and conflicting emotions that rule our inner lives and makes them into beautifully, often mysterious written stories. 

15. The First Time by Karl Fleming and Anne T. Fleming

Writers, celebrities, and other "notable" people talk about their early sexual experiences. The ones that interested me most: Maya Angelou, Mae West, Loretta Lynn, and Benjamin Spock.

 16. The Witch's Daughter by Paula Brackston***

I wanted an adult version of Elizabeth George Spears's The Witches of Blackbird Pond, but this uninspired, poorly written book was definitely not that. I gave it about 100 pages before I bailed.

16. The Maytrees Annie Dillard**

I can't believe, picking up this book again, that I abandoned it the first time after about 30 pages. I remember thinking the first time around that the pacing was awful, like reading about watching paint dry. On the return, however, I see that this is a beautifully written novel.

*-Re-read
**-Finishing a previously shamefully abandoned book
***-Begun and shamelessly abandoned